You’ve Been Eminent Domain’d
I guess this is what you get when you put an extension on a house this close to the ever-widening DC beltway, but man… I still feel bad for these folks.
The Bradbury Building
Another thing Amanda did while I was in Los Angeles was give me a tour of the city that was both incredibly personal and instructive. The most amazing moment was how she handled taking me to The Bradbury Building. It almost feels unfair to describe it — so you can get a glimpse of what the experience was like — because that’s the opposite of how she handled it. She just said, I’m going to take you by The Bradbury, and we parked, and then we walked in.
optical illusion of the day
slow motion landslide in New York
It’s oozing slowly, Kozlowski says, no faster than three feet per day. But it’s so big that scientists have been arriving from all over the country to study it.
neighbor’s house
Remembered from winter.
How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City’s Dark Side for ‘L.A. Noire’
Earlier this week, video game enthusiasts and fans of L.A. history cheered the release of Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire, a police procedural game noted for its faithful reproduction of Los Angeles circa 1947. To recreate a city now hidden beneath 64 years of redevelopment projects and transformed by age and expansion, production designers with the game’s developer, Team Bondi, consulted several Los Angeles area archives.
from the spam
Architecture is a visual art, along with the buildings speak by themselves.
smokestack
Part of the (now closed) Iron City Brewery.
church on the hillside
The dome of Immaculate Heart of Mary on Polish Hill, and a closed warehouse.
dusk
Demolition rubble, an undemolished building, and sky.
Trees cocooned in spider webs after flooding in Sindh, Pakistan
(Via @josephpearson)
Grain And Railroad. U.S. 56, Kinsley, KS 67547
The Only Frank Lloyd Wright in Detroit
Stumbling upon an abandoned Frank Lloyd Wright in their neighborhood of 25 years, Norman Silk and Dale Morgan had a vision to restore the mid-century gem to its grandeur.
(via marginal revolution)
from the comments
SC:
Okay, someone is home, I’m not going to say who, and they are purposefully milling about. I’m not going to say what’s going on except to say it’s nothing untoward. The window in front of that large white plaster sculpture in the first NYT gallery photo is open. There’s a very nice view of the front of that. It’s got a large boob-like thing on the side you can’t see in the NYT photo (and I’m thinking Mr. Bra would appreciate that). The gold boxes aren’t glowing. No one is watching the giant big screen TV. There. That’s enough. The shade is down. Now we can all feel igry for each other.
the Southwest Texas Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living Field Laboratory
In October 2007, Mr. Wells bought this land — a 40-acre parcel — for $8,000 in cash, adding a 20-acre tract for $5,000 a year and a half later. It took nine days and $1,600 to build the shell of his one-room house, the first structure in a compound that now includes four shipping containers under a soaring arched roof planted on a lacy framework of metal trusses, all of which he made himself. He gave it all a fancy moniker, the Southwest Texas Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living Field Laboratory, but you can call it the Field Lab for short.
By the following summer, he had started a blog detailing his daily struggles and small triumphs, planting guy wires for the wind turbines or extracting a scorpion from the composting toilet.
His blog is here.
P.S. Grace beat me to this on Twitter. I’m watching you, Grace.
from the archives: March 18, 2010
Damn, this was fine.
Like you’d expect, it started out good and the comments made it all more betterer.
searching for the house of Ruben Bustes
Daryl, Sheila and I saw something today we think is the setting for a story. Driving through an old Oak Cliff neighborhood, looking for the house of Ruben Bustes (that’s a story in itself), we came across a one story ranch on a corner lot. The back was fenced with low chain link fortified inside with cactus. Inside the yard was another fence, also fortified with cactus, that housed a small dog house. I think that’s all we’ve got. Please tell us what it means.
Cat-Library™
This would solve all my problems. All of them.
(Via Dylan, who got it from Charlie)
from the spam
The dominant theme in the foyer is medievalism with a life-sized knight in shining armor “guarding” the large double doors, and an equally threatening armored warhorse peeking around the corner.
Mid-Century Preservation — or Not — in Chicago
Talk about your perfect storm for losing a piece of architecture! This building on S. State Street has it all: it’s in a busy area, it’s a retail facade, and it’s Midcentury in origin.
It’s slated to be remodeled into something forgettable. Blair Kamin wrote a an excellent summation of the who, what, why, and why-it-shouldn’t.
(From a chicago sojourn.)
from the archives: July 25, 2007
The loose-meat concept was introduced to clusterflock in 2007, when Michael Grant Smith declared that
I just want to eat moist crumbly sandwiches at a funky little joint that uses residential-style screen doors to block out houseflies and time.
and that What you need is a loose-meat sandwich.
The year 2008 saw a revival of the topic in the form of my Open Letter to Michael Grant Smith and Kathy Hilen-Smith and Kathy’s invitation to Join us at Maid-Rite.
from the comments
The part of these stories that always depresses me is that the clever micro-house is always located on the builder’s parents’ farm, or friend’s orchard. It’s the $200 micro-lot that would do wonders for humanity.
I really cooled to Walden when I got to the scene in which Thoreau buys the boards of a laborer’s hovel as the family is being evicted in the dead of night. Our narrator makes some vague, sad noises about the man’s destruction by wage labor, then goes whistling back to his sublime experiment in well-funded self-sufficiency.
Tiny Yellow House #2: “Gypsy Junker”
A recycled portable cabin-shack-fort-bunkhouse (“semi-viable housing”). As featured in the NYT: The $200 Microhouse.
Historic Property for Sale
Old Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas.
Ten-plus bedrooms. Seven-plus bathrooms. Twenty-five thousand square feet.Three-plus acres.
Kinda pricey for the likes of us, though. Listed at $975K.
But maybe we could bargain ‘em down. The seller is described as “very motivated.”
Oh, and there’s this: “The fort sits on the banks of the Rio Grande River across from Ciudad Juarez.”
Spelled Cuidad Juarez in the listing. Indeed.
Architect Barbie
She’s not wearing enough black to be an architect.
God (or the devil) will be in the details
Target’s announcement that it will open a store in one of Chicago’s great architectural landmarks, Louis Sullivan’s former Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store, is at first blush welcome news, both for the building and the Loop.
The building, located at 1 S. State St. and largely constructed between 1899 and 1906, was designed for retailing and Target is a retailer. That’s good.
