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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleA 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...
View ArticleLines in the Air
Gaston Tissandier's and Jacques Ducom's aerial photograph, from Hippolyte Meyer-Heine, La photographie en ballon et la téléphotographie (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1899), 4.On 19 June 1885, the Parisian...
View Article1979 (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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleFollow 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...
View ArticleCenterville/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),...
View ArticleThomas 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...
View ArticleAttributing 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleExit 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....
View ArticleCapsule 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...
View ArticleSome 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...
View ArticleRocket 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...
View ArticleOf 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...
View ArticleThe 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,...
View ArticleArchitecture 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...
View ArticleUtopia 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...
View ArticleSymposium 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...
View Article