May 2007
blog time
05/30/07 Filed in: Ideas
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!
video road trip
05/30/07 Filed in: Rambling
Click the photo to watch The Frugal Traveler's video blog of his US road trip. He posts a new segment posted each Wednesday. The New York Times really got my number with this one: An old volvo on a cross-country road trip- meow!
unoffical music video
05/29/07 Filed in: Art
BLONDE REDHEAD: There was a period when the band
Blonde Redhead was the soundtrack for my life.
Thankfully that phase has passed, but from time to
time I enjoy revisiting Blonde Redhead's music.
Recently Fette's Flog- Aesthetic Los
Angeles directed me to some "unoffical"
Redhead videos made by Mike Mills.
Here is the LINK to the video for Top Ranking, which stars the one and only Miranda July, doing one pose a second!
Here is the LINK to the video for Top Ranking, which stars the one and only Miranda July, doing one pose a second!
tracking transience
05/24/07 Filed in: Art
Recently artist Hasan Elahi came by for brunch. We sat around talking about life in Houston, mutual friends, art projects and silly YouTube videos. It was all very normal until he pulled out his camera to photograph our meal "for the FBI."
Hasan’s project Trackingtransience uses modern technologies to document every aspect of his life. The project is a reaction to the FBI accusation that he was a possible terrorist in 2002. He subsequently spent 6 months under FBI surveillance, including 9 polygraph tests. Now we are able to track Hasan’s movements via his ATM transactions and flight patterns which appear on this website. His hacked cell phone registers his location and with the help of GPS shows us an aerial map with his location pin-pointed. His meals and restroom breaks are documented with photographs. All this self-induced voyeurism helps us to imagine what life without privacy looks like. In his recent interview on the radio program Studio360 Hasan says: “if we do not take control of our own information, and define ourselves, other people will define ourselves for us.”
gallivantin' galveston gal
05/21/07 Filed in: Rambling
Shortly after arriving in Houston, last August, we were at a cocktail party associated with my job. I was talking with a woman about wanting to go check out Galveston, the seaside city on the Gulf of Mexico and only 35 minutes from downtown Houston. She seemed to think the beaches were cleaner these days because "the hotels are no longer giving out those special towels that clean the tar balls off your legs." Gross! After her comment I imagined a nasty Petrol-polluted landscape, and was really surprised at the beautiful beachfront campsite we had this weekend at the Galveston Island State Park, located at the remote western end of the island.
Galveston Island State Park Slideshow
Gallivantin' Galveston Gal comes via The Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry.
glasstire posted our review of Media Archeology
05/20/07 Filed in: Art
Glasstire has posted the article we wrote about the
Aurora Picture Show Media Archeology Festival. Check
out the article here
radical reference
05/19/07 Filed in: Ideas
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
harry smith in the UK
05/17/07 Filed in: Art
My
friend Robert Blackson is doing some really
interesting curating over at the Reg Vardy Gallery at
the University of Sunderland, where he recently
opened the exhibition Harry Smith: Hobbies and
films in collaboration
with alt.gallery’s Harry Smith Anthology
Remixed.
Harry
Smith was first brought
to Rob’s attention by the writer
David Levi
Strauss.
Rob and I have decided that every 5 years we will get together to launch a new exhibition that addresses the theme of LOVE, a love redux. No doubt the upcoming 2009 exhibition will have a very different feeling from Your Heart is No Match for My Love, the 2004 exhibition we organized for The Soap Factory in Minneapolis.
“Harry Smith, who died in 1991, was a polymath of the highest order. With his coke bottle glasses, slight hunchback and long, bony tobacco-stained fingers, Smith dedicated himself to a life of seemingly infinite interests. He collected Seminole patchworks and painted Ukranian Easter eggs. He was a leading authority on string figures (such as the 'cat's cradle') and made a study of the underlying principles of Highland tartans. He recorded the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians and in a project entitled "Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture in the Lower East Side", made vast live recordings of traffic noises, children's jump-rope rhymes and city birdsong, as well as the drug talk of junkies and the death-rattles and prayers of hobos in Bowery flophouses (where he himself lived in poverty for some time).
He was one of the most influential figures in avant-garde film, developing new and ingenious methods of animation, and he collected thousands of folk records which later formed the basis for the work he is best remembered for - the Anthology of American Folk Music - the seminal collection of early music recordings that was in a large part responsible for triggering the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s.”
-- George Pendle
Rob and I have decided that every 5 years we will get together to launch a new exhibition that addresses the theme of LOVE, a love redux. No doubt the upcoming 2009 exhibition will have a very different feeling from Your Heart is No Match for My Love, the 2004 exhibition we organized for The Soap Factory in Minneapolis.
“Harry Smith, who died in 1991, was a polymath of the highest order. With his coke bottle glasses, slight hunchback and long, bony tobacco-stained fingers, Smith dedicated himself to a life of seemingly infinite interests. He collected Seminole patchworks and painted Ukranian Easter eggs. He was a leading authority on string figures (such as the 'cat's cradle') and made a study of the underlying principles of Highland tartans. He recorded the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians and in a project entitled "Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture in the Lower East Side", made vast live recordings of traffic noises, children's jump-rope rhymes and city birdsong, as well as the drug talk of junkies and the death-rattles and prayers of hobos in Bowery flophouses (where he himself lived in poverty for some time).
He was one of the most influential figures in avant-garde film, developing new and ingenious methods of animation, and he collected thousands of folk records which later formed the basis for the work he is best remembered for - the Anthology of American Folk Music - the seminal collection of early music recordings that was in a large part responsible for triggering the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s.”
-- George Pendle
fire fighting goats
05/16/07 Filed in: Ideas
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.
pimp my car
05/15/07 Filed in: Art
The Art Car Parade Slideshow
Houston is known for leading the way on two visionary projects from the 1950s: the Interstate System and the Space Program. But anyone who thinks the contemporary residents of this car-city lack creativity, should come on down to the annual Art Car Parade. It is a total freak show for the whole family.
Last month there was a day of protest against the war in Iraq, but the protesters did not gather as pedestrians in the town square holding placards. In Houston they congregate on the Highway 59 overpasses during Rush Hour and drop their banners down for the commuters to read while they sit in traffic. Ingenuity abounds!
Art Car Slideshow
machines for living
05/14/07 Filed in: Ideas
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 Filed in: Ideas
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.
want to invest with me?
05/12/07 Filed in: Art
The “Contentment House” is for Sale
Desert Hot Springs Motel, located on the outskirts of Palm Springs, is composed of four intimate interlocking units, each with its own patio and cacti garden. The structure is gunite (sprayed concrete), steel, glass and redwood.
In 1927, Lucien Hubbard, a Hollywood writer and producer purchased property on the outskirts of Palm Springs in what would become Desert Hot Springs and began the development of a private Hollywood guest ranch, the B Bar H Ranch. The early Hollywood crowd would come out and spend time horseback riding, playing tennis, swimming and retreating from the movie industry out in the desert. Mary Pickford, Bing Crosby, the Marx Brothers, Tyrone Power, Lionel Barrymore, Peter Lorre, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper were some of the guests who would frequent his ranch. Before World War II, Hubbard sold his ranch and went into the war as a war correspondent for “Reader’s Digest”. He appears as himself in “The Story of GI Joe” (1945). After the war, Hubbard commissioned John Lautner to build the Desert Hot Springs Motel, which was originally referred to as “Contentment House”. The original plans were quite extensive, with numerous spa buildings and retail shopping. Only the four rooms of the motel were built along with the swimming pools. The swimming pools, which were located across the street from the motel, were torn down in the early 1970s by developers. After many years of being closed to the public, Steve Lowe purchased the legendary Desert Hot Springs Motel in 2000 and, after renovating it, reopened the motel. He passed away in January.
Real estate listing
machines for living
05/12/07 Filed in: Ideas
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.
high desert tour with clui
05/09/07 Filed in: Rambling
Creative Constructions in the Morongo Basin
A Center for Land Use Interpretation Bus Tour
9 AM- MOCA Los Angeles
11 AM- Desert Christ Park
12 PM- The Institute of Mentalphysics
2 PM- A- Z West/ Andrea Zittel Land
3 PM- Noah Purifoy Sculpture Park
4 PM- The Intergratron
5 PM- The iT House
6 PM- Pioneertown
7 PM- Dinner & beer at Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace
High Desert Slideshow
sunday in los angeles with the sharps
05/06/07 Filed in: Rambling
