Launch of An Atlas of Radical Cartography
12/03/07
I am so excited about this project/publication!
Thursday, December 6th @ 7PM - Free
Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, New York City
between Stanton & Rivington (Near 2nd Ave- F/V)
Reading: Mogel & Bhagat "An Atlas of Radical Cartography"
Please join editors Lize Mogel and Lex Bhagat to celebrate the publication of "An Atlas of Radical Cartography," a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays exploring social issues from globalization to garbage. Cutting across the boundaries of art, literacy, and activism, radical cartography calls upon us to utilize maps as political agents for social change.
For more information & to order your own copy: An Atlas of Radical Cartography
Thursday, December 6th @ 7PM - Free
Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, New York City
between Stanton & Rivington (Near 2nd Ave- F/V)
Reading: Mogel & Bhagat "An Atlas of Radical Cartography"
Please join editors Lize Mogel and Lex Bhagat to celebrate the publication of "An Atlas of Radical Cartography," a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays exploring social issues from globalization to garbage. Cutting across the boundaries of art, literacy, and activism, radical cartography calls upon us to utilize maps as political agents for social change.
For more information & to order your own copy: An Atlas of Radical Cartography
We were here
12/02/07
Up: Matt Coolidge from The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Down: Rich Pell from The Institute for Applied Autonomy
Yesterday at The Aurora Picture Show
Click here to see more photos
Matt McCormick's blog has great coverage of the weekend
Good luck to Your Daily Awesome
11/22/07
I was sad to read that the blog Your Daily
Awesome has come to an end, as it is one
of my daily favorites. But I love that YDA's last
post was this clip "A History of Texas" from David
Byrne's movie True Stories. This movie
was my quirky introduction to living in Texas and
I knew that I had to buy the dvd when we moved to
Houston. Numerous times I have quoted moments from
True Stories to someone in passing and it
is comforting to know there are others out there
who recognize the odd brilliance of this film!
Good luck to you Mr.YDA & thanks for all the
great bits this year.
Take the Challenge!
07/03/07
The Buckminster Fuller Challenge:
Each year a distinguished jury will award a single $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth's ecological integrity.
Pedi-Move-it
07/03/07
A few weeks ago, I created a slideshow about bikes
and included photos of people moving via bike in
Portland, Oregon. Having moved once while living in
Amsterdam with only a bike, the notion of moving via
bike made sense to me. But I thought those Portland photos documented a
lovely, freak one-time event. Tonight I learned
there is an actual Bike Moving movement
in Portland, which is facilitated by the
community cycling network SHIFT. The trailer
below documents a bike move, thanks to the
NAU website. While the clothes
on Nau are a tad expensive, they are a
responsible company and the designs are pretty
hot. In planning the contents for my 1 suitcase
for the upcoming year on the road, I ordered a
skirt and jacket from them. They make clothes
for the long haul - just what I need!
don't mess
06/01/07
Did you know that the slogan DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS was not coined by a redneck wielding a gun? The phrase was actually created for the Texas Department of Transportation as part of a statewide anti-littering campaign in the late 1980s. I found this cute Vermont postcard when we went snowboarding in January. Vermont wins as the smallest state with this biggest personality. Looking forward to being back there in September to do some leaf peeping. If you are up on your Vermont humor, you will love this 802 RAP
blog time
05/30/07
Last night I was talking with a friend who innocently
asked "Who has TIME to read blogs?" Sheepishly I
thought ‘worse yet, who has TIME to post to a blog?’
Rather than sit around for too long feeling like I
lacked an action packed life, I starting to think
about how this blog, or blogging in general,
originated. Is there a link to connect the creation
of a blog to the tradition of committed
correspondence/ Pen Pals and Mail Art, perhaps by
taking a slight detour through public access/
community television?
The computer made it possible to make multiple copies of a letter, allowing the writer to create group letters and mini communities of receivers. The writer and mail artist Lex Bhagat brilliantly utilized the group letter, often to the chagrin of the recipients who wanted individually tailored missives. The CC of an email, the inclusive cousin of the BCC has replaced the printed group letter. The BCC is abused in the business world, often as a way to cover one’s own ass.
Mail Art made creative use of the Postal Service and was an "art movement" whose heyday was between the 1950s and the 1960s. This network of artists was subverting (or simply uninterested in) the commercial gallery system. These artists created a system of exchange that based on generosity, and to some degree totally self motivated and involved. The ephemera of Mail Art took the form of letters, illustrated envelopes, postcards, and friendship books amongst other forms. It could be anything, as long as you could put a stamp on it!
The group of artists most associated with Mail Art was the Fluxus movement and Ray Johnson is sometimes called the 'Father of Mail Art.' In the early 1970s the brave curator, Marcia Tucker, organized an exhibition at the Whitney Museum that was instigated by Ray Johnson. This exhibition and subsequent shows during the 70s helped create official sounding names like "The New York Correspondence School," to describe the group of mail artists communicating with Johnson.
Mail Art also created the sense of a ore interconnected "Global World" which corresponded with theories being espoused at that time by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. Mail art also allowed many non-Western artists to develop lasting artistic relationships with artists based in New York and European.
This type of DIY spirited networking also trickled into the publishing industry and was embraced in the creation of the 'The Whole Earth Catalog' which was distribution between 1968 and 1972. This DIY catalog was intended to provide education and 'tools' that would enable the reader to "shape his/her own environment." While obviously utopian, this catalog was deeply influential on the 'Back to the land' movement and entire counterculture of the 1960s. Steve Jobs, the entrepreneur behind Apple Computers, said this networked catalog was the conceptual forerunner of a Web search engine. "When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great ideas."
Last year the beautifully designed book 'Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century" was published and in New York Times Review of Books was called "The Whole Earth Catalog retooled for the iPod Generation." You can save some cash by just spending time on their website.
More to come... I have run out of TIME.
But for now we know just who has time to read blogs- You!
The computer made it possible to make multiple copies of a letter, allowing the writer to create group letters and mini communities of receivers. The writer and mail artist Lex Bhagat brilliantly utilized the group letter, often to the chagrin of the recipients who wanted individually tailored missives. The CC of an email, the inclusive cousin of the BCC has replaced the printed group letter. The BCC is abused in the business world, often as a way to cover one’s own ass.
Mail Art made creative use of the Postal Service and was an "art movement" whose heyday was between the 1950s and the 1960s. This network of artists was subverting (or simply uninterested in) the commercial gallery system. These artists created a system of exchange that based on generosity, and to some degree totally self motivated and involved. The ephemera of Mail Art took the form of letters, illustrated envelopes, postcards, and friendship books amongst other forms. It could be anything, as long as you could put a stamp on it!
The group of artists most associated with Mail Art was the Fluxus movement and Ray Johnson is sometimes called the 'Father of Mail Art.' In the early 1970s the brave curator, Marcia Tucker, organized an exhibition at the Whitney Museum that was instigated by Ray Johnson. This exhibition and subsequent shows during the 70s helped create official sounding names like "The New York Correspondence School," to describe the group of mail artists communicating with Johnson.
Mail Art also created the sense of a ore interconnected "Global World" which corresponded with theories being espoused at that time by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. Mail art also allowed many non-Western artists to develop lasting artistic relationships with artists based in New York and European.
This type of DIY spirited networking also trickled into the publishing industry and was embraced in the creation of the 'The Whole Earth Catalog' which was distribution between 1968 and 1972. This DIY catalog was intended to provide education and 'tools' that would enable the reader to "shape his/her own environment." While obviously utopian, this catalog was deeply influential on the 'Back to the land' movement and entire counterculture of the 1960s. Steve Jobs, the entrepreneur behind Apple Computers, said this networked catalog was the conceptual forerunner of a Web search engine. "When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great ideas."
Last year the beautifully designed book 'Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century" was published and in New York Times Review of Books was called "The Whole Earth Catalog retooled for the iPod Generation." You can save some cash by just spending time on their website.
More to come... I have run out of TIME.
But for now we know just who has time to read blogs- You!
radical reference
05/19/07
In 1966 Richard
Brautigan wrote the novel The Abortion: An Historical
Romance.
The story takes place in an unusual library that
accepted books from anyone who wished to drop them
off. As an homage to this fictional place The
Brautigan Library was created and for many years
was housed within the Fletcher Free Library in
Burlington, Vermont. This library within a library
accepted only unpublished manuscripts.
Recently curator and founding director of the Aurora Picture Show, Andrea Grover (aka: Mistress of the Microcinema) brought a curious trend to my attention, artists making their personal libraries available to the public. A few great examples of this are recent projects by Martha Rosler, Steina & Woody Vasulka and Rick Prelinger.
Personal libraries are different from digitizing and making public archives, but interestingly related.
Digital archive Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library, started in 1971 by Michael Hart. The mission of PG is to digitize and share its extensive collection of public domain books with the public. Where as the vast online archive of industrial, instructional and ephemeral films at Archive.org are accessible to all, and free to many for use in education, commercial or artistic projects. YouTube is loaded with mash-ups created from these archived films.
VIDEO:This is the Prelinger Collection...
There are some provocative questions associated with the simple question of why this is happening? I hope that Andrea and I will tease out some of these ideas in the blog later this summer. But for now, I wanted you to know the Martha Rosler's Library is opening as a component of the ambitious Berlin-based project unitednationsplaza.
Martha Rosler Library is comprised of approximately 7,700 titles from the artist's personal collection and was opened to the public by e-flux in November 2005 as a storefront reading room on Ludlow street in New York City.
A personal library represents the private sphere of an individual, her way of acquiring and combining knowledge. Accumulation is the result of an intellectual inquiry that takes place in parallel with a more random search, which can lead us to unexpected textual, and therefore mental, spaces. Martha Rosler Library offers the visitor an opportunity to approach this open source of information with her or his own interests, and to create new affinities and connections between the elements of the library that add to more than the sum of knowledge contained in it.
A reading group will be assembled to use the library as the basis for a series of informal discussions around texts chosen by Martha Rosler and members of the group. The meetings were initiated in New York, and are continuing at all locations of the library as it travels. For each meeting, a guest reader will select a text from the library and lead the group.
(reblogged from e-flux)
Unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school. Structured as a seminar/residency program in the city of Berlin, it will involve collaboration with approximately 60 artists, writers, theorists and a wide range of audiences for a period of one year. In the tradition of Free Universities, most of its events will be open to all those interested to take part.
Radical Reference comes from a real sexy librarian movement, check them out here
Recently curator and founding director of the Aurora Picture Show, Andrea Grover (aka: Mistress of the Microcinema) brought a curious trend to my attention, artists making their personal libraries available to the public. A few great examples of this are recent projects by Martha Rosler, Steina & Woody Vasulka and Rick Prelinger.
Personal libraries are different from digitizing and making public archives, but interestingly related.
Digital archive Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library, started in 1971 by Michael Hart. The mission of PG is to digitize and share its extensive collection of public domain books with the public. Where as the vast online archive of industrial, instructional and ephemeral films at Archive.org are accessible to all, and free to many for use in education, commercial or artistic projects. YouTube is loaded with mash-ups created from these archived films.
VIDEO:This is the Prelinger Collection...
There are some provocative questions associated with the simple question of why this is happening? I hope that Andrea and I will tease out some of these ideas in the blog later this summer. But for now, I wanted you to know the Martha Rosler's Library is opening as a component of the ambitious Berlin-based project unitednationsplaza.
Martha Rosler Library is comprised of approximately 7,700 titles from the artist's personal collection and was opened to the public by e-flux in November 2005 as a storefront reading room on Ludlow street in New York City.
A personal library represents the private sphere of an individual, her way of acquiring and combining knowledge. Accumulation is the result of an intellectual inquiry that takes place in parallel with a more random search, which can lead us to unexpected textual, and therefore mental, spaces. Martha Rosler Library offers the visitor an opportunity to approach this open source of information with her or his own interests, and to create new affinities and connections between the elements of the library that add to more than the sum of knowledge contained in it.
A reading group will be assembled to use the library as the basis for a series of informal discussions around texts chosen by Martha Rosler and members of the group. The meetings were initiated in New York, and are continuing at all locations of the library as it travels. For each meeting, a guest reader will select a text from the library and lead the group.
(reblogged from e-flux)
Unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school. Structured as a seminar/residency program in the city of Berlin, it will involve collaboration with approximately 60 artists, writers, theorists and a wide range of audiences for a period of one year. In the tradition of Free Universities, most of its events will be open to all those interested to take part.
Radical Reference comes from a real sexy librarian movement, check them out here
fire fighting goats
05/16/07
The citizens of Los Angeles are deeply concerned after serious wildfires in the Griffith Park and Hollywood Hills have destroyed vast swaths of urban wilderness and killed or displaced thousands of animals during their breeding season.
These fires feed upon unchecked dry undergrowth, and endanger lives, homes, historic monuments and our enjoyment of the city. It will take decades before Griffith Park is restored to its pre-fire condition.
We the undersigned demand that the City of Los Angeles and the L.A. Department of Recreation and Parks respond to this continued threat by bringing in shepherds with herds of goats to graze on the dry hills, a plan previously implemented with great success by UC Berkeley in the aftermath of that community's devastating 1991 fire.
Goats are economical, ecological fire-fighting machines that produce fertilizer as they clear hills and canyons of weeds, poison oak and dry chaparral. Additionally, the animals are charming, newsworthy ambassadors for fire safety, a subject that needs to be more widely discussed.
We want to save our parks and mountains. We want goats! (Reblogged from 1947project.com)
WARNING We had a gaggle of urban goats in Albany, NY. Whenever they got out of their pen the goats would happily strip the bark off the fruit trees we were growing in our lot and eat everything in the garden. But if you are still looking to hire a herd of your own, you can go here.
machines for living
05/14/07
MACHINES FOR
LIVING: FAILURE
The Supine Dome
If you have spent enough time with me you are sure to have heard about my interest in Geodesic domes. It is not a nostalgia for the 1960s or some latent hippiness that drives my leisure pursuit. I have heard about how awful it was to live in a dome; they leaked, privacy was nill as they were impossible to soundproof. But for me the Geodesic dome is a great symbol- a sign of both utopian vision and also spectacular failure.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Elaine de Kooning and Josef Albers working on the first domes at Black Mountain College.
The dome uses the "doing more with less" idea in that it encloses the largest volume of interior space with the least amount of surface area thus saving on materials and cost. At Black Mountain College in 1948 and ’49, Fuller and students spent a great deal of time working on the design and construction of geodesic domes. In 1948, their attempt to build the first large-scale dome with venetian blind strips failed, and the structure was subsequently referred to as the “Supine Dome”. The next summer, working with a slightly larger budget and thicker blinds, they were successful.
- Excerpt from Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, Asheville, NC
Then you have the idealistic artists of Drop City, the squatter style commune that sprang up in south eastern Colorado in 1965 as "land to be open and free to the people." This commune was immortalized in the 1970 "back to the land" bible Shelter, published in 1973 and these images endure as some of the most iconic images of the 1960s counter-cultural buildings. The original four founders of the project were inspired by the architectural ideas of Buckminister Fuller and the art "happenings" of Allan Kaprow, both of which originated at Black Mountain College. By 1968 Drop City and was overrun with hippies & drugs and the original settlers moved down the mountains and into Boulder, CO.
There is much to be learned from FAILURE and here is a book project that recently caught my attention:
Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices has been published by The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. A book of essays, interviews and artwork that together offer a minor history of failure. Tracing the idea of failure through contemporary art, activism and social protest movements, literature and philosophy, the work in Failure! cuts against a notion of forward progress by instead exploring various dead-ends on the timeline of history. Failure! gives us ways to map our lives in relationship to improper paths. From Valerie Solanas to the Weather Underground, and beyond (and behind).
Available at AK Press
Hopefully soon I will have a profile here with David McConville, co-founder of The Elumenati immersive projection design firm and one of my favorite people to talk with about domes, Buckminster Fuller and the early films of Charles and Ray Eames.
The Supine Dome
If you have spent enough time with me you are sure to have heard about my interest in Geodesic domes. It is not a nostalgia for the 1960s or some latent hippiness that drives my leisure pursuit. I have heard about how awful it was to live in a dome; they leaked, privacy was nill as they were impossible to soundproof. But for me the Geodesic dome is a great symbol- a sign of both utopian vision and also spectacular failure.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Elaine de Kooning and Josef Albers working on the first domes at Black Mountain College.
The dome uses the "doing more with less" idea in that it encloses the largest volume of interior space with the least amount of surface area thus saving on materials and cost. At Black Mountain College in 1948 and ’49, Fuller and students spent a great deal of time working on the design and construction of geodesic domes. In 1948, their attempt to build the first large-scale dome with venetian blind strips failed, and the structure was subsequently referred to as the “Supine Dome”. The next summer, working with a slightly larger budget and thicker blinds, they were successful.
- Excerpt from Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, Asheville, NC
Then you have the idealistic artists of Drop City, the squatter style commune that sprang up in south eastern Colorado in 1965 as "land to be open and free to the people." This commune was immortalized in the 1970 "back to the land" bible Shelter, published in 1973 and these images endure as some of the most iconic images of the 1960s counter-cultural buildings. The original four founders of the project were inspired by the architectural ideas of Buckminister Fuller and the art "happenings" of Allan Kaprow, both of which originated at Black Mountain College. By 1968 Drop City and was overrun with hippies & drugs and the original settlers moved down the mountains and into Boulder, CO.
There is much to be learned from FAILURE and here is a book project that recently caught my attention:
Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices has been published by The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. A book of essays, interviews and artwork that together offer a minor history of failure. Tracing the idea of failure through contemporary art, activism and social protest movements, literature and philosophy, the work in Failure! cuts against a notion of forward progress by instead exploring various dead-ends on the timeline of history. Failure! gives us ways to map our lives in relationship to improper paths. From Valerie Solanas to the Weather Underground, and beyond (and behind).
Available at AK Press
Hopefully soon I will have a profile here with David McConville, co-founder of The Elumenati immersive projection design firm and one of my favorite people to talk with about domes, Buckminster Fuller and the early films of Charles and Ray Eames.
machines for living
05/13/07
MACHINES FOR
LIVING: SHELTER
Before it's time- The Dymaxion House
The prototype of Buckminster Fuller's dynamically efficient prefab home from 1948 is entombed at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
During his career, Fuller was awarded twenty-five U.S. patents, authored twenty-eight books, and received forty-seven honorary doctorates. Best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, "Bucky" campaigned his entire life for responsible conservation of the earth's resources to avoid ecological disaster. He emphasized technological efficiency by insisting on getting "more with less", coined the term "Spaceship Earth", and is considered one of the founders of the environmental design movement.
1945, the Dymaxion House was Fuller's solution to the need for a mass-produced, affordable, easily transportable and environmentally efficient house. The word "Dymaxion" was coined by combining parts of three of Bucky's favorite words: DY (dynamic), MAX (maximum), and ION (tension). The house used tension suspension from a central column or mast, sold for the price of a Cadillac, and could be shipped worldwide in its own metal tube. Toward the end of WW II, Fuller attempted to create a new industry for mass-producing Dymaxion Houses.
After WWII, Fuller convinced Beech Aircraft of Wichita, Kansas, to work with him to bring his Dymaxion House to life. The aircraft factory was the perfect choice as materials used in both the Dymaxion House and airplanes were very similar. Unfortunately, "Bucky" would not compromise his design which led to disagreement among the associates of the newly formed Fuller Houses Inc. and ultimately to the collapse of the company. The only two prototypes of the round, aluminum house were purchased by investor William Graham. In 1948, Graham constructed a hybridized version of the Dymaxion House as his family's home; the Grahams lived there into the 1970s.
See More, Do More, Live More- The Airstream
Wally Byam's shiny trailers hit the road in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression. These factory produced mobile homes were made from lightweight, durable aluminum designed for aircrafts during the first World War.
Check out the amazing Weblog Tour America from Rich, Eleanor and Emma, the "full-timing" family and editor of Airstream Life magazine.
Pre-Fab Modernism- The Dwell Magazine Revolution ?
I heard Office of Mobile Design's Jennifer Siegal speak last month in Chicago at the C6 Symposium. Siegal might be best known for her Swellhouse pre-fab home design produced for the Dwell House Invitational. OMD's perspective is reactive, visionary and yet practical.
Check out the OMD Globetrotter, a mobile theater that unfolds from a cargo truck container and is described as "cross-breeding of high theater and high camping." (might use this later to describe my life)
While the re-use of cargo containers can be appropriate in temporary or dire situations (see the Rx Box project headed up by "me ex") there are some drawbacks to this recycling. Cargo containers are uninsulated and get too hot in some climates and too cold in others. Also when you cut into them to make a door or window the structural integrity of the steel is compromised.
OMD's philosophy is to focus on and design for our mobile lives. Bravo! I will skip over the Paul Virilio quotes and just let you listen to Jennifer Siegal in this video:
West Coast Choppers meets Prefab Modernism
This is a sexy little video about prefab production by Marmol Radziner. Like OMD, this team is building prefab model homes in the high desert outside Los Angeles.
Matt Coolidge, the Director of CLUI and docent of our recent bus trip along Highway 62 commented that the openness of the high desert is not just a way of thinking about landscape. The openness of the desert extends to social norms (more personal freedom), spirituality (UFO landings and New Age retreats) and to an open environment for experimental architecture (because of open, cheap land.) While none of these modern prefab firms are building "affordable housing" (a big critique) they are operating in a utopian tradition of social and physical experimentation taking place out in the desert.
Before it's time- The Dymaxion House
The prototype of Buckminster Fuller's dynamically efficient prefab home from 1948 is entombed at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
During his career, Fuller was awarded twenty-five U.S. patents, authored twenty-eight books, and received forty-seven honorary doctorates. Best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, "Bucky" campaigned his entire life for responsible conservation of the earth's resources to avoid ecological disaster. He emphasized technological efficiency by insisting on getting "more with less", coined the term "Spaceship Earth", and is considered one of the founders of the environmental design movement.
1945, the Dymaxion House was Fuller's solution to the need for a mass-produced, affordable, easily transportable and environmentally efficient house. The word "Dymaxion" was coined by combining parts of three of Bucky's favorite words: DY (dynamic), MAX (maximum), and ION (tension). The house used tension suspension from a central column or mast, sold for the price of a Cadillac, and could be shipped worldwide in its own metal tube. Toward the end of WW II, Fuller attempted to create a new industry for mass-producing Dymaxion Houses.
After WWII, Fuller convinced Beech Aircraft of Wichita, Kansas, to work with him to bring his Dymaxion House to life. The aircraft factory was the perfect choice as materials used in both the Dymaxion House and airplanes were very similar. Unfortunately, "Bucky" would not compromise his design which led to disagreement among the associates of the newly formed Fuller Houses Inc. and ultimately to the collapse of the company. The only two prototypes of the round, aluminum house were purchased by investor William Graham. In 1948, Graham constructed a hybridized version of the Dymaxion House as his family's home; the Grahams lived there into the 1970s.
See More, Do More, Live More- The Airstream
Wally Byam's shiny trailers hit the road in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression. These factory produced mobile homes were made from lightweight, durable aluminum designed for aircrafts during the first World War.
Check out the amazing Weblog Tour America from Rich, Eleanor and Emma, the "full-timing" family and editor of Airstream Life magazine.
Pre-Fab Modernism- The Dwell Magazine Revolution ?
I heard Office of Mobile Design's Jennifer Siegal speak last month in Chicago at the C6 Symposium. Siegal might be best known for her Swellhouse pre-fab home design produced for the Dwell House Invitational. OMD's perspective is reactive, visionary and yet practical.
Check out the OMD Globetrotter, a mobile theater that unfolds from a cargo truck container and is described as "cross-breeding of high theater and high camping." (might use this later to describe my life)
While the re-use of cargo containers can be appropriate in temporary or dire situations (see the Rx Box project headed up by "me ex") there are some drawbacks to this recycling. Cargo containers are uninsulated and get too hot in some climates and too cold in others. Also when you cut into them to make a door or window the structural integrity of the steel is compromised.
OMD's philosophy is to focus on and design for our mobile lives. Bravo! I will skip over the Paul Virilio quotes and just let you listen to Jennifer Siegal in this video:
West Coast Choppers meets Prefab Modernism
This is a sexy little video about prefab production by Marmol Radziner. Like OMD, this team is building prefab model homes in the high desert outside Los Angeles.
Matt Coolidge, the Director of CLUI and docent of our recent bus trip along Highway 62 commented that the openness of the high desert is not just a way of thinking about landscape. The openness of the desert extends to social norms (more personal freedom), spirituality (UFO landings and New Age retreats) and to an open environment for experimental architecture (because of open, cheap land.) While none of these modern prefab firms are building "affordable housing" (a big critique) they are operating in a utopian tradition of social and physical experimentation taking place out in the desert.
machines for living
05/12/07
MACHINES FOR
LIVING: GETTING
STARTED
Back in 1998 Lex Bhagat and I produced a series of ol' skool zines using Photoshop and a crappy old Zerox machine someone gave us. The zine was called FOLD, because each issue had a different folding configuration. This conceptual/ aesthetic decision made it difficult to get the pages back in the proper order once it was unfolded, but it expanded the notion of what a zine could look like. It would have been cool if we had discussed the endless possibilities for paper folding with an origami expert.
FOLD imagined futuristic cities in manifesto-like articles on Permaculture, urban gardening and citizen controlled urban spaces. FOLD also made visual comparisons between theoretical city planning and actual urban spaces. One of my favorite comparisons was between Le Corbusier’s plans for the Radiant City and the Empire State Plaza, in Albany New York.
Almost ten years later, now aided by this RapidWeaver blog software and my MacBook it is time for me to revisit these themes in a new series called MACHINES FOR LIVING, a term borrowed from the Le Corbusier book Towards a New Architecture.
My intention is that this series will mutate and takes over the blog with a web of loosely interconnected ideas, interviews, photos and videos.But for now, we are just at the edge of that... but today is yesterday’s tomorrow.
Back in 1998 Lex Bhagat and I produced a series of ol' skool zines using Photoshop and a crappy old Zerox machine someone gave us. The zine was called FOLD, because each issue had a different folding configuration. This conceptual/ aesthetic decision made it difficult to get the pages back in the proper order once it was unfolded, but it expanded the notion of what a zine could look like. It would have been cool if we had discussed the endless possibilities for paper folding with an origami expert.
FOLD imagined futuristic cities in manifesto-like articles on Permaculture, urban gardening and citizen controlled urban spaces. FOLD also made visual comparisons between theoretical city planning and actual urban spaces. One of my favorite comparisons was between Le Corbusier’s plans for the Radiant City and the Empire State Plaza, in Albany New York.
Almost ten years later, now aided by this RapidWeaver blog software and my MacBook it is time for me to revisit these themes in a new series called MACHINES FOR LIVING, a term borrowed from the Le Corbusier book Towards a New Architecture.
My intention is that this series will mutate and takes over the blog with a web of loosely interconnected ideas, interviews, photos and videos.But for now, we are just at the edge of that... but today is yesterday’s tomorrow.