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Wes Anderson vs. Jacques Tati
Check out Wes Anderson's new spot for Stella Artois. A little Mon Oncle, no?
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Volume to Space
Olivier Messiaen in Bryce Canyon, Utah, 1971 (Source)More remains to be said about the relationship of music criticism to architecture criticism. Or put another way, music criticism should be...
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Figures of Involvement
Minutemen (L to R: d. boon, George Hurley, Mike Watt) at the 1984 Los Angeles Street Scene (photo by Eric Stringer) (Source).While we are on the topic of statistics [1], I only need to remind you of a...
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Seen and Not Seen
Postcard depicting the Comte de Lambert's 1909 flight around the Eiffel Tower (Source: Wright State University Library Special Collections)The earliest, most well-known romance between architecture and...
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A Sartorial Moment
"The unveiling of the Palace of Soviets' model, Paris, 1931" (Source: Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the U.S.S.R.: Theories and Project for Moscow, 1928-1936, Kenneth Hylton, trans....
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Happy Holidays
Christmas card by Bob Wirth depicting LCM Chair as Santa Claus. Sent to Charles and Ray Eames in 1948 (Source)A quick note to thank everyone for helping make 2010 a great year for this is a456. I could...
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Symposium Season
A quick note to remind readers of a symposium I am helping organize at Princeton. Called "Teaching Architecture, Practicing Pedagogy," this event is dedicated to new research on the history of...
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Utopia For Sale
Stanley Resor (1879-1962) (Source: Karen E. Mishra, "J. Walter Thompson: Building Trust in Troubled Times," Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2009), 246-269)The idea that good...
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Architecture on Trial
A colleague of mine is raising funds for a film about Jim Stirling'sLeicester Engineering Building (1963). Called MORE THAN a Building? Architecture on Trial, the film promises to be a detailed look at...
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The Harvard Candle
Detonation of Napalm M47 Device, Harvard University, 4 July 1942 (Source: Louis F. Fieser, The Scientfic Method: A Personal Account of Unusual Projects in War and in Peace [New York: Reinhold,...
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Of Hyphens and Hurricanes
S.S. Phemius (Built in 1921, Sunk by U-515 on 20 December 1943) (Source)Hurricane season is upon us, so consider these excerpts from Richard Hughes’ largely forgotten novel In Hazard (1938). Both are...
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Rocket Talk
Space Capsule, from Walter Hohmann, The Attainability of Heavenly Bodies, Technical Translation F-44, U.S. Joint Publications Service, trans. (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space...
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Some Updates
Directions for camera usage (Source: Richard Linklater, Slacker [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992])A very quick note to let you know about some things I have written of late that have appeared...
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Capsule Review: The Heights
From Kate Ascher, The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (2011)Deep into the index of Kate Ascher’s likable and engaging The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (The Penguin Press, 2011), we learn that...
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Exit Strategy
Timofey Pnin's Isometric Head (Source: ccassidy)February, 1957. A wintry day at fictional Waindell College, somewhere in the fictional Northeastern United States. The world is at its greyest....
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The Aerodynamic Lightness of Being
Louis-Pierre Mouillard (1834-1897), Nile Vulture (Otogyps auricularis), from L’Empire de l’air (1881)The year is 1881. Convalescing in Alexandria, sketching images of Nile Vultures gliding in the...
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Attributing Modernism
Antonin Raymond, Summer House at Karuizawa, South and East Facades, Nagano Prefecture, Japan (1933) (Source: Kurt Helfrich and William Whittaker, eds. Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and...
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Thomas Pynchon's 115th Dream
Hibbing High School, Hibbing Minnesota, From The Air (Source: Minnesota Historical Society)"I think I'll call it America" / I said as we hit land"-Bob Dylan (né Robert Allen Zimmerman), Hibbing High...
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Centerville/Interzone, or: Map Ref. 41°N 93°W
(Figure 1) “Views of Centerville” (Source: L.L. Taylor, ed. Past and Present of Appanoose County, Iowa: A Record of Settlement, Organization, Progress and Achievement (Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1913),...
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Follow The Light
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), The Annunciation (1899), Oil on Canvas, 57 x 71 1/4 inches (144.8 x 181 cm) Framed: 73 3/4 x 87 1/4 inches (187.3 x 221.6 cm)Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Annunciation...
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The Law of Levity is Allowed to Supersede the Law of Gravity
Cover to R.A. Lafferty, Space Chantey (1968) It was an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways.Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination...
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1979 (Book Zero)
Spread from Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) (Source: The Newberry Library)1.Ponce, Puerto Rico was the world I once knew best. It was a small city nestled on a leeward coastal...
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A Reader's Guide To A Reader's Guide
(Left to Right) Dennis Wilson, Laurie Bird, and James Taylor, with a 1955 Chevrolet 210 Hardtop, from Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)It is easy to admire Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four...
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The Face of the Earth ... Masked by Beard, Glasses and Wig
130 year-old man from Minnesota, from László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (1929)In Von Material zu Architektur (1929) (later translated to English as The New Vision), László Moholy-Nagy...
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Patina, Provenance, Mass Production
Sticker sheet and 'zine included with Fender's Sonic Youth-model guitars (Source)Is there an industrial, mass-produced object that resists change the way that an electric guitar or bass does? Electric...
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