I’ve been digging back through the New Yorker magazine archive, looking for ads from Alcoa’s Forecast Collection campaign. That’s the one, if you will remember, for which Ray and Charles Eames created the Solar Do-Nothing Machine [which has since completely disappeared, but which I will one day bring back.]
What a fantastic campaign it’s turning out to have been: beautiful objects and concepts created to brand aluminum as the material of America’s glorious consumer future. It’s like a virtual world’s fair pavilion, fabricated [almost] entirely out of marketing. And all executed by a slate of top drawer artists, designers and photographers. And somehow, almost completely invisible now.
So far, I haven’t been able to find any thorough or systematic treatment of Alcoa’s Forecast program, so let me put a couple of great-looking things into the mix:
From a July 25, 1959 ad, here’s a modular aluminum shelter designed by Eliot Noyes, and photographed by William Bell. Unlike the Eameses and Isamu Noguchi’s Prismatic Table, which were both executed as life-size prototypes, it looks like Noyes’s Forecast contribution never made it past the maquette stage. I expect to see this referenced in the next Urs Fischer catalogue.
Category: architecture
Who Knew There Was Writing Inside Those Aspen Magazines?
Making no small plans, the very first issue of Aspen contained a little booklet titled, “Configurations of the New World,”, papers, speeches, essays, discussions on the future [of cities, mostly] from 13 of the whitest guys they could find, as presented at the Aspen Design Conference. Here are a couple of quotes that caught my eye.
From “The Victory of Technique over Content,” a rumination/condemnation of the 1964 New York World’s Fair by architect and editor of Progressive Architecture, Jan C. Rowan:
The New York World’s Fair, in its planning, and its buildings, and its exhibits, shows us only what we already know: That we are creating very fast an ugly, inconvenient, depressing environment–full of gadgetry–that can occasionally hypnotize us through its razzle-dazzle and glitter, but, lacking any significant content, leaves us, in the long run, nervous, uneasy, and empty.
And from the late Interior Secretary and ur-environmentalist Stewart Udall’s optimistically titled essay, “The New Conservation Can Work,” comes this:
If we have reached the point where good design means efficiency, where investing in a good design or in a scheme of beauty is the best investment a businessman can make, we may have reached the point that Walter Gropius speculated on a few years ago when he said we wouldn’t really begin to build with greatness in this country until we had the right combination of politicians, artists, scientists, and enlightened businessmen. Maybe this is coming about.
Aspen 1, remember, was published in 1965, while the body of Park Avenue was still warm, with Gropius’s gargantuan urban disaster, the Pan Am Building, stuck in its heart. So maybe not.
5 Things I Dig About This Vintage California Home Magazine Cover
5. That plant.
4. That Girard-lookin’ wall hanging.
3. Those Piet Hein Eek-lookin’ sofas.
2. The Courier-lookin’ typeface on those teasers.
1. A tie between Curries & Smog.
via LA Modern, which will be auctioning this and other vintage press material on May 23, 2010 [lama blog]
Cage Match
I was reading Calvin Tomkins’ 1963 New Yorker profile of abstract sculptor Richard Lippold, who was a favorite of the International Style and High Modernist architecture crowd. Depending on your mood, Lippold’s giant, intricate, and ambitious metal & wire works were breaking Important Art of The Future out of the twee confines of the gallery and museum. Or he was making quintessentially aggrandizing corporate lobby art, built-in Bertoias for barons and bankers.
Most of the article tells the crazy story of the creation and installation of Lippold’s best-known work, Apollo and Orpheus, which tumbles through the lobby of Philharmonic Hall [now Avery Fisher Hall] at Lincoln Center. But this remarkable bit is from May 1962, and the making of his most-seen work, The Globe [later changed to Flight], the shimmering, golden wire sculpture in the Vanderbilt Avenue lobby of the Emery Roth, Gropius & Belluschi’s Pan Am building [now Met Life] behind Grand Central Station:
Lippold was also engaged at this time in a curious negotiation with his Pan Am patrons. He had discovered that the building had been wired throughout for Muzak. Muzak has long been one of Lippold’s particular abominations, and, with his customary directness, he voiced his dismay at a cocktail party given by the late Erwin S. Wolfson, the New York investment builder who had largely conceived and financed the Pan Am Building. If the building had to have music at all, Lippold suggested jokingly, why not let him commission some contemporary music by John Cage? Wolfson floored him by saying, “Go ahead.” At the time, Lippold told a friend, “Wolfson belongs to the new breed of industrialists who respect artists. He trusts them, he’s willing to let them do what they want without interference. But, my God! Think of it! Cage is still too avant-garde for the concert halls, and here’s a chance for his music to be played to an audience of thousands and thousands a day! It will be the first time in history that music has been commissioned to go with architecture–or at least, the first time since the medieval cathedral Mass.” Wolfson said he would take care of persuading his board of directors, and Lippold got Cage started thinking about the project.
Not sure what’s more unsettling: the “new breed of industrialists” gladhanding, or the Richter-meets-Kinkade-style paradox of Cage doing Muzak.
But whaddya know, the project went forward. As one might have expected of an artist working in ambient sound, Cage had invested years of thought in solving The Muzak Problem. In his 1998 article in The Musical Quarterly on Cage’s approach to silence, Douglas Kahn makes an interesting analysis of Muzak’s connection to the development of Cage’s best-known composition, 4’33”. In a lecture he gave in 1948, four years before creating 4’33”, but which he never republished, Cage talked about another silent composition, Silent Prayer:…which would consist of 3 to 4-1/2 minutes of sustained silence (the maximum time being just three seconds short of 4’33”) to be played over the Muzak network.
Unlike the silence of 4’33”, in which not playing is the means for the audience to hear the sounds surrounding them, Kahn wrote that Cage saw Silent Prayer more like an intermission, a “reprieve” from Muzak’s unobtrusive yet pervasive performance.
He also makes a fascinating point about Duchamp’s readymades and the length of Silent Prayer [and, by a 3-second extension, 4’33”], which was based on the standard duration of commercial music.
Back to Pan Am. With the technical assistance of Bell Labs [Kluver? Anyone? Aha, Max Matthews. see the update below.] Cage’s Muzak project had made it to the “elaborate presentations” stage, and by August 12, 1962, the idea was fully developed enough for Raymond Ericson to report the details in the Times:
[Cage] decided to “make use of the things that were right there” in the lobby. This was to include the supply of Muzak, for which Pan Am had a contract; the necessary speakers in the walls, and a set-up of television screens with photo-electric cells for keeping an eye on the passers-by.
Mr. Cage devised a system whereby the people going through the lobby would activate the photo-electric cells. These in turn would release the Muzak music, which would become pulverized and filtered in the process. Even people getting in and out of elevators would have a part in producing the sound. Since the cells would never be activated in the same way, the results would be constantly in variation.
Rather than underscore the pervasiveness of Muzak by giving its unwilling audience a temporary reprieve, Cage would make the pedestrian throngs aware of their collective selves, by giving everyone the power to toggle the Muzak off and on.
Unfortunately, Wolfson, the new breed of industrialist, died in July, and the reason the Times was writing about Cage’s piece was because the old breed of board members had just rejected it. “As one vice president said: ‘The American business man and the esthete do not always see eye to eye.” Really.
Ericson’s kicker makes me want to head up to Bard and start digging through the archive at the John Cage Trust: Mr. Cage does not feel particularly disappointed in the failure of his plan. He believes his ideas are sufficiently in the air to be acted on someday.
UPDATE: Apparently, in the Spring 2008 issue of Representations, the University of California Press Journal, Herve Vanel wrote an article about Cage’s relationship with Muzak titled, “John Cage’s Muzak-Plus: The Fu(rni)ture of Music.” which I would buy for something less than the $14 UCP is asking. [UPDATE UPDATE: it seems like I’m the only guy without a subscription, better get on board. Thanks to Douglas and Brian for loaning me their pdf version of Vanel’s article.]
Some interesting finds from Vanel’s paper: Cage had been thinking about a Muzak composition, called Muzak-Plus, in 1961, which I would imagine his friend Lippold would have known about. It was Bell Labs computer music pioneer Max Matthews who collaborated with Cage on the Pan Am Building, not Billy Kluver. But Matthews’ photo-electric switch and mixer design apparently resurfaced as a dance device in 1965 when Kluver participated in Variations V with Cage, Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, and Stan VanDerBeek. Which is like the best Merce & John clip on YouTube.
On the downside, is that renovation related to the 2005 purchase of the Met Life building by Tishman Speyer? Or have security retrofits destroyed whatever spatial integrity the lobby had? Do we know need to wonder what a John Cage piece based on the random, unimpeded flow of crowds into a lobby would sound like before and after September 11?
The Pneumatic Nomadic Campus
Domes, inflatables, World Expos, Buckminster Fuller, every once in a while around here, it feels like I’m just blogging about whatever artist Steve Roden blogged about three years ago.
The Antioch Bubble is one of those times. [Though, to my credit, I was within range in Feb. 2008]
After its main Ohio campus was shut down by a student strike, Antioch College began establishing satellite campuses around the country. The school’s hands-on, experiential learning approach lent itself to the development of a giant, one-acre bubble structure in Columbia, Maryland to house administration, classes, and other student activities. There were domes and other bubbles inside the 32,000 sf Bubble.
Considering they’re mostly used for tennis courts and sports stadiums now, it’s interesting to how politically polarized this inflatable structure concept had once been. Ant Farm was promoting inflatable lounges for naked hippies at Altamont at the same time the USIA was building a giant, balloon-roofed pavilion for the Osaka World Expo. And at the center of a master-planned real estate development of a city, Activist/architect Rurik Eckstrom was ranting against evil corporations from his Ford Foundation-funded dome.
The Antioch Bubble was contemporaneous with it all; there was a full model and 1,000sf mockup in the bag by 1971, and the real thing started going up in the Fall of 1972. An early Nor’easter flattened it in November of ’73. Design and construction were overseen by Ekstrom, an architecture professor at UMD, and a team of 15 students.
It’s still blowing my mind a little bit that such a radical-sounding guy as Eckstrom could be spearheading a truly experimental program to rebuild America’s schools, and with widespread institutional support. And at the same time that Popular Science is announcing the Glorious Inflatable Future has arrived, and we’ll all soon be living in Goodyear houses. PopSci called it “Antioch’s one-acre Pneumatic Nomadic Campus,” and touted its inexpensive portability.
From a NY Times article on May 26, 1973 [interior photo above], it appears a bit of the educational/collaborative value of the project was lost in a rushed to complete in time to host the National Conference on Air Structures in Education, which sounds like an event created to tap a funding source:
[Student/designer/participant Mike Krinsky] said he came here in January because he thought Antioch and the bubble project might help him learn to become a “competent activist.” He said he had become, instead, a poorly paid day laborer. “I’m leaving right now feeling I’ve been used.”
An important lesson for the interns of the future.
On the bright side, when Roden posted about Antioch in 2007, there was almost nothing online about it, or about Ekstrom. That has now changed. Factory School is building an archive of historical material and first-person accounts of the Bubble, which is being helped along by the likes of Google Books.
And the DC area may see another Pneumatic Event Space yet. If the Hirshhorn’s DS+R courtyard-filling donut bubble comes to fruition, the inflatable future may yet be upon us.
[2o22 update] While the fate of Factory School’s update is unclear, I did just receive an amazing first-person account of The Bubble from Richard Benjamin:
I worked and semi officially lived in The Bubble for about a year. It was great experience. The basic idea was sound, improvisation is what kept it up. The building was fairly (tolerably?) comfortable in Spring and Fall, scaldingly hot in summer, and numbingly cold in winter. The Bubble had heating and AC, both proved a bit inadequate if memory serves…but neither were used much due to huge spikes in energy costs not anticipated by the builders. The building didn’t require a lot electric power to stay inflated…if the wind blew in the right direction you could turn off the fans. You just opened an airlock on windward side and that produced enough pressure to keep the building inflated-with a bit more sway and sag than normal.Climbing along the main roof cables was a lot of fun. The building rocked up and down in the slightest breeze. We did a lot of climbing because the thin skin required constant patching. You sat of an inflatable mattress to make repairs…quite high above the ground, but you didn’t notice unless you were over the clear skin sections. If you fell through it would likely kill you. Nobody fell…not for lack of trying. The Bubble was located near an outdoor music venue, and music goers would not infrequently wander over to have a look. The more inebriated would decide to climb up one of the main cables. Sometimes wearing high heels. When they encountered the clear sections and realized they were maybe three stories off the ground, they would freeze in place. A rescue team with an air mattress would be sent topside to shove them to safety.A couple of years after the Bubble went down in a fading hurricane, I went to Syracuse University to get Ph.D. in biology. Syracuse had a brand new stadium with an air supported dome. I’d sit high in the cheap seats and think “yeah, I had a part in making this fad possible.”
Epic. Thank you for your service.
Event Architecture [airform archive]
Learning from Antioch – Columbia [factoryschool.com at the internet archive, rip]
Welcome To The Kabul Dome
In 1956, USIA exhibitions director Jack Masey had a problem: the Soviets and the Red Chinese and their big pavilions usually had a lock on the International Trade Fair in Kabul [that’s the capital of Afghanistan, you know]. The US Commerce Secretary had decided America should be all over those non-aligned/third world trade fairs, but the US had, like, a few animatronic chickens, and a television, that’s it. Then Masey called Buckminster Fuller. The story–and many, many more of Masey’s expo exploits–is told in his 2008 book, Cold War Confrontations: US Exhibitions and their Role in the Cultural Cold War, but I’ll let Thomas Zung’s Buckminster Fuller: anthology for a new millennium tell it.
Actually, let me paraphrase my way to the specs and the punchline. Sometimes you don’t realize how badly something’s written until you try to retype it yourself:
One week of engineering; one month of construction and packing; one dome and one engineer flown to Kabul on one DC-4; untrained Afghan workers assembling color-coded parts getting the thing built in 48 hours. 100-ft diameter, 35-ft tall, 8,000 sf uninterrupted floor space made it the largest Geodesic structure in the world at the time. Made from 480 3-inch aluminum tubes, weighed 9,200 lbs, nylon skin: 1,300 lbs.
And it totally killed at the fair. Afghans loved the US had them building it themselves. It reminded them of a yurt. It basically kicked Commie ass. Zung, are you ever gonna come through?
The Department of Commerce had now become interested in the kudos value [sic] of Geodesic domes. The Geodesics, it was argued, dramatized American ingenuity, vision, and technological dynamism; as structures to house American trade exhibits they would be tangible symbols of progress. Fuller’s three-way grids were better propaganda than double-meaning speeches broadcast to regions in which radios were scarce. Domes as large as the Kabul dome, and larger, were flown from country to country, girdling the globe; and many of these also set attendance records. Within a short space, Fuller’s domes were seen in Poznan, Casablanca, Tunis, Salonika, Istanbul, Madras, Delhi, Bombay, Rangoon, Bangkok, Tokyo, and Osaka.
Mhmm. News reports of the time cite the television and large projection screens as the big draws, actually, but I’m sure it was the dome’s awesomeness.
Hard to say from the photographs, though, because I can’t find a single image of the Kabul Dome in Kabul, or any of its other tour stops. As with so many other aspects of Fuller’s visual/cultural legacy, original photos and archival documentation are on lockdown, and many of his acolytes seem content to just marvel at the mathematical elegance of the Geodesic schematics.
Bedazzled Joannou
The story smells a little planted, but as long as a couple of these awesome Razzle Dazzle, Dakis Razzin,’ New Museum critiquin’ posters find their way into a mailing tube and land on my doorstep, I will definitely play along:
Whoa, look at this incredible protest poster Hrag spotted on the street. Somehow, he managed to track the artists down. That kid has mad Googling skillz! Unbelievable! And awesome!
New Museum Ethics Quagmire Gets Its Own Unofficial Ad Campaign [hyperallergic via @tylergreendc]
Previously: BeDazzled camo at RISD; Koons Razzle Dazzle On Dakis’s Yacht
‘Hier ist die Future’ By Matthew Thompson
I just bought this incredible poster at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, designed by Mies van der Rohe, in DC. It’s for “Hier ist die Future,” an exhibition held last year at the library by British artist Matthew Thompson.
Thompson explored the intersections of King and Mies, civil rights and modernism, by re-creating a minimalist, triangular plywood shelter designed by UMD architecture professor John Wiebenson and his students for Resurrection City, the 2,800 person encampment on the National Mall organized as part of King’s and the SCLC’s Poor Peoples’ Campaign in the summer of 1968.
The PPC was intended to expand the Civil Rights Movement’s mission to include the needs and rights of the poor; Resurrection City, originally conceived as City of Hope, was to be an in-government’s-face reminder of the invisible poor while King and others lobbied for new jobs, welfare, housing, and education-related legislation.
Unfortunately, King’s assassination that April, followed by poor organization, horrible weather, and then Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June, left Resurrection City an ineffective mess.
Thompson obtained the original drawings and plans for the Resurrection City shelters from Wiebenson’s widow, along with archival photos and materials of the encampment. He furnished his version with a Barcelona chair, his poster, and a 1971 coffee table book on urbanism.
The Social Sciences division of the library did a video podcast with Thompson that offers the best discussion and documentation of the project I’ve found so far. [dcpl-socialsciences.blogspot.com]
The Library also posted installation shots for “Hier ist die Future” on flickr [flickr]
“Hier ist die Future,” by Matthew Thompson, 8 January – 28 February 2009
The Allure Of Permanence
A lot of people are excited about the takedown of Nicolai Ouroussoff in Design Observer this week. And I can see their quaint, anti-starchitect point. But for me, Ouroussoff’s biggest crime only became clear this afternoon. That’s when I had to learn about Eldorado Stone,
“THE MOST BELIEVABLE ARCHITECTURAL STONE VENEER IN THE WORLD™”
not from the architecture critic the NY Times imported from Southern California–Eldorado’s biggest market!–but from the bed of a contractor’s truck on the way to kindergarten pickup.
Is there a more exquisite tagline in the entire design world? Oh wait:
BELIEVABILITY
To us, it’s more than a corporate tagline. It’s at the very core of our company philosophy.
My sincere apologies. I didn’t mean– It’s just– What else could you call the intersection of honesty in design and fake rocks, but “most believable”? I’m blown away. Please go on:
We constantly ask ourselves, does our Mountain Blend Stacked Stone evoke the precision of a hand-laid, dry-stack set? Is our Bucktown Rubble an accurate representation of the stonework of rural Pennsylvania? Does our Veneto Fieldledge really look like it was just gathered from a pristine meadow?
Relentless self-reflection. Precision. Accuracy. Representation.
Three Critical Steps There are three critical steps in the creation of TMBASVITW. The first is the careful selection of stones from nature that will form the basis of our molds. Our craftsman [sic] sort through tons of stone, piece-by-piece, selecting only rocks that complement each other and have just the right shape, texture, size, and detail.
After the optimal stones are selected, special molds are fabricated…
Deep moss green. Russet brown. Golden umber. Nature’s palette is limitless. And the palette of Eldorado Stone isn’t much smaller. Drawing on more than 30 years of research and development, Eldorado utilizes a vast array of pigments in the stone-coloration process–the third and final step in achieving unmatched depth and variation.
Holy smokes, this is not some injection-molded, hide-a-transformer boulder from SkyMall. These folks are mass-producing believably artfully random rocks in more than two dozen completely different, national and regional styles!
This is our world, people! Every river rock fireplace, every gated community gate, every tanning salon and Starbucks in every upscale strip mall built in the country the last ten years was made with fake rocks of–it turns out–varying degrees of believability.
Who among purported fine artists is collaborating with the proven craftsmen of Eldorado Stone to bring more believability to your contemporary artworks? Who? Because while you dither about video installations, the Eldorado Stone Crew artist collective already has an installation video in the can:
As the video demonstrates, the quantity of Stone needed to fabricate this cube-shaped sculpture is around 320 sq ft [8 x 8 x 5], plus 64 lineal feet [8 x 8] of corner pieces.
And their hardcover inspiration catalogue? The title alone is worth $24.95: The Allure of Permanence. It’s like the most believable Tuscan farmhouse subdivision in the world, built out of pure language.
Eldorado Stone [eldoradostone.com]
On Celestographs And Photograms
Apparently, in the 1890s, the Swedish modernist playwright August Strindberg went through a period of intense imagemaking. He created paintings and photographs [hold that thought] that sound and look decades ahead of their time using chance and natural/chemical processes such as burning and oxidation. Technically, his photographs are better called photograms, but Strindberg called them “celestographs”:
Strindberg distrusted camera lenses, since he considered them to give a distorted representation of reality. Over the years he built several simple lens-less cameras made from cigar boxes or similar containers with a cardboard front in which he had used a needle to prick a minute hole. But the celestographs were produced by an even more direct method using neither lens nor camera. The experiments involved quite simply placing his photographic plates on a window sill or perhaps directly on the ground (sometimes, he tells us, already lying in the developing bath) and letting them be exposed to the starry sky.
The black or darkly earth-colored pictures that eventually appeared are strewn with a myriad small, lighter dots that Strindberg thought were stars. That they might have been drops of dew, some kind of atmospheric particles, or just some dirt in the developer cannot be ruled out.
It’s remarkable that Strindberg was so acutely aware of the subjectivities of photography’s mechanics while remaining apparently oblivious, or at least sanguine, about the unavoidable influences of his chemical process.
The celestrographs remind me of similarly produced photograms by Liz Deschenes, which she showed at Miguel Abreu last summer. From the press release for Tilt/Swing:
Deschenes fills Bayer’s empty panels with empty photographs – photograms evacuated of all representational content. By exposing photosensitive paper to the darkness of night and bringing the sheets back indoors before sunrise to fix them with silver toner, she produces a range of slightly reflective sheens. The photogram circumvents the responsibility of figurative depiction in favor of temporal record. The photographic moment has passed, but the possibility for another image begins, or continues. The passersby may scan the slippery surface, detecting their own cloudy features. Although out-of-focus and incomplete, we are pictured. The resulting image, more absorptive than reflective, is fleeting. As the exhibition proceeds, the atmospheric circumstances will tend to slightly oxidize the photograms’ surfaces, manifesting a third, time based material operation.
The Celestographs of August Strindberg, by Douglas Feuk, Summer 2001 [cabinetmagazine.org via vvork, thanks andy]
Strindberg’s celestographs were in Massimiliano Gioni’s 2008 exhibit, After Nature [newmuseum.org]
Your Imploded View (2001) By Olafur Eliasson
For all my talk lately about satelloons, Olafur’s stayed very politely quiet about his own giant, swinging aluminum balls. Maybe because he only has one? Seriously, though, I hope it’s an edition.
Your Imploded View is a 51-inch diameter, 660-lb polished aluminum sphere that swings like a pendulum. It dates from way back to 2001 [!], though it’s not clear when it was first realized. At that weight and dimension, it has to be solid, which is rather spectacular. Such precision-manufactured geometry reminds me of the fantastically produced objets de science like Le Grand K, the International Kilogram Prototype stored outside Paris.
Anyway, the Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St Louis purchased Your Imploded View in 2005, and it’s on permanent view in the atrium there. Kemper curator Meredith Malone’s YouTube video is nice and informative, but HD would be better for capturing the sculpture’s experience. Don’t miss they guy using the special, custom-made Your Carpet-Wrapped Pushing Trident to get the ball swinging.
Your Imploded View (2001) by Olafur Eliasson on permanent view at the Kemper Museum, St Louis [kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu]
On Printing German Wallpaper & Richter’s Film
For their “Art of Two Germanys” show in 2008, LACMA recreated part of a 1966 gallery installation by Gerhard Richter called Volker Bradke, which was designed to mimic or reference the postwar German bourgeoisie’s penchant for ticky tacky floral wallpaper.
But instead of real wallpaper, the museum used an artifact from the original installation, loaned by the piece’s owner via the gallery: a rubber stamp roll with a design carved into it. LACMA’s curator and gallery manager talk here about printing up the walls, but for some reason, I just can’t get enough of this video of them actually doing it.
This reminds me a bit of Christopher Wool, and it’s a fantastic-looking method of generating an image. Or a design, or a surface, whatever you end up calling it. The fact that it’s a painted simulacrum and not actual wallpaper, though, seems pretty relevant, as does the curator’s instruction that “the printing is not supposed to look perfect.” It sounds like an early example of Richter reminding the viewer that he’s looking at an image, not the thing itself.
Anyway, this is all coming down today because Bradke is the subject of Richter’s only film, a 14-min black & white short which was part of the installation. It’s just been released on DVD, along with a book, »Volker Bradke« und das Prinzip der Unschärfe [“Volker Bradke and the Uncertainty Principle] by art historian Hubertus Butin. From what I can tell, the whole project was designed to turn Richter’s friend and studio assistant into a celebrity, using paintings, posters, banners, and a fawning profile film. We’ll see how the film turns out when it arrives; but so far, Richter doesn’t seem too compelled to revisit the medium. [via @gerhardrichter]
Wallpaper in Art of Two Germanys, part II [lacma blog]
That Minnesota Skyway For Sale Again/Still
In this difficult real estate environment, close followers of the used modernist Skyway market will note have reason to be optimistic. Even as asking prices have dropped nearly 40% in the last year,–from $79,500,to around $49,500–they are still way above 2002 and 2006 results of $1 and “a very small amount” that’s probably closer to $1 than $49,500, respectively.
SKYWAY FOR SALE – AGAIN!!! [minneapolis.craigslist.org, thanks sheree from aol]
City Desk Studio architects for all your used Skyway needs [citydeskstudio.com]
In Your Face, Detroit!
The nightly LED show on the facade of the new Motor City Casino in Detroit [via sweet juniper]
Multiverse a now-permanent installation by Leo Villareal at the National Gallery of Art:
I think it’s clear that when it comes to this sort of thing, DC clearly has Detroit beat!
Danish Moisture Farmers
Ten years, people. That’s how long it took me to spot this. Ten. Years. What can I say, I got no excuse. I let you down.
Olafur Eliasson, Double Sunset, 1999 [olafureliasson.net]
While I’m on the topic, my friend John Powers has been killing it with his new blog Star Wars Modern.
You may know him from such web awesomeness as Star Wars: A New Heap, which he published on Triple Canopy last year. Clearly, there’s more where that came from.