I hoped that I'd find my kindle -miraculously- fixed after I came back from the living room- after watching Green Book, but it wasn't. I gave it a sudden look like always as if the way I look at it would have any effect in regaining its functionality. Still, the e-ink crystals still wouldn't alter… Continue reading Dead Kindle
The Paper Architecture of Brodsky and Utkin
Aleksandr Brodsky and Ilya Utkin have today become known in the Russian art world for their intriguing works of architecture, ranging from everything such as a sculpture to a artistically repurposed building or shed, but what they are probably most known for are several copper plate etchings they created displaying fantastical archictectural designs, a product of their lives and experiences as architects in a time when reform was present and ideas were ever-changing. Their story and the inspiration behind the drawings is probably best said in the book written on these drawings:
“In 1957 Kruschev declared socialist realist architecture the “over-decorated” style and abolished the Academy of Architecture. the notion of a critically assimilated cultural heritage (i.e. the reuse of classical forms to serve modern ideological ends) was replaced by a doctrine of unadorned utilitarianism. modern technology, especially prefabrication, was exploited to produce the urgently needed mass housing and aesthetic…
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Liberal Cities? What Recent Elections Mean for Global Urban History
By Michael Goebel, Freie Universität Berlin
The agitated politics of 2016 have led intellectuals the world over to ponder the “end of the Anglo-American order,” the “bankruptcy of the post-war world order,” and the death of “liberalism.” That this death has been diagnosed before—for instance by the late Chris Bayly in the conclusion of his magisterial study of the globalizing nineteenth century—makes today’s echoes of the past all the more eerie. But the precedent may also make historians chary of issuing premature death certificates. Urban history and global history can be combined fruitfully in thinking about past and current trends in democracy and populism.
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Open source Marxism: Free PDFs from Historical Materialism, Verso, and Jacobin
Critical (of) Reconstruction
See also this link to a conference on critical reconstruction and the IBA, in Porto, Portugal, 4th – 8th November: http://berlim-reconstrucaocritica.blogspot.com/. My original post below:
‘Critical Reconstruction’. A term used to describe the policy for rebuilding post-wall Berlin. The vast areas of waste ground left by the wall zones were to be infilled, by reverting to older street patterns, and by following a set of conservative building codes which limited the height, and (in places) the style of new buildings.
In Pariser Platz, next to the Brandenburg Gate, the building rules seem to have been at their most restrictive, with every new building complying with the required style of horizontal stone banding. Frank Gehry’s Deutsche Bank HQ has had to hide his signature shiny-curvy building behind a singularly uninteresting façade. The rebuiltHotel Adlon is just an overscaled version of the original, and the recently-completed American Embassy, which…
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The Berlin IBA 1987
“… the greatest creations of architecture are not so much the product of individual labour, rather the product of social endeavour, they are things simply cobbled together by working people, rather than inspired inventions of the creative genius, they are the traces a nation leaves behind, the strata desposited by the centuries, the lees of successive evaporations of human society, in short they are a kind of geological formation”.
Victor Hugo
In the UK, the term postmodernism is still a dirty word; it refers to that clunky jokey-neoclassical architecture that was used to design speculative, planning-restriction-free office developments in the Thatcherite years of the 1980s.
But in Berlin at that time, postmodernism was the style of a different kind of development – carefully planned urban housing and infrastructure projects. In the UK, architects had withdrawn from designing mass housing after the disastrous social experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s. In…
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“My Appearance” — David Foster Wallace
I am a woman who appeared in public on Late Night with David Letterman on March 22, 1989.
In the words of my husband, Rudy, I am a woman whose face and attitudes are known to something over half of the measurable population of the United States, whose name is on lips and covers and screens. Whose heart’s heart is invisible to the world and unapproachably hidden. Which is what Rudy thought could save me from all this appearance implied.
The week of March 19, 1989, was the week David Letterman’s variety-and-talk show featured a series of taped skits on the private activities and pastimes of executives at NBC. My husband and I sacrificed sleep and stayed up late, watching. My husband, whose name in the entertainment industry is better known than his face, had claimed at first to be neutrally excited about the call I’d gotten from Late Night
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Townhouse’s Model Citizens Exhibit
Townhouse is about to close its month-long exhibit “Model Citizens,” in which a team of a dozen artists (working from over 10,000 photos of Townhouse’s neighborhood) created an extremely detailed miniature model of the neighborhood. After eight months, thirty citizens who live/ work in the neighborhood were interviewed on stories of the neighborhood’s history and what they would like it to look like.
Changes have been made according to these people’s wishes. The idea itself–to propose an alternative vision for the future of the neighborhood other than what the government would choose–has allowed all of its viewers to appreciate the intricate details of their surroundings as well as challenged us to imagine this neighborhood in a way that we like to see it look.
As I live in this neighborhood, and have for over a year, I was quite excited to see what changes locals wanted. The responses were certainly…
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Walk
I will fly!
Don’t fly, it’s dangerous.
But I want to fly. I was born to..
No! No flying. Walking is safe. Walk!
And so he walked into the crowd. He was never seen again.
1/4 A4 
