Give a mason bricks and mortar and tell him to cover a space and let in light, and the results are astounding. The mason, within his limitations, finds unending possibilities, there is variety and harmony; while the modern architect with all the materials and structural systems available to him produces monotony and dissonance, and that in great abundance.also: limitations.
jamshid kooros
Dec 8, 2015
brick and mortar
Dec 2, 2015
Nov 27, 2015
australia
brilliant corners, kingsland road; ceryth wyn evans at white cube; wigmore street; manchester square; russ & daughters; robert irwin at white cube; lamb walk; shand street.
Nov 17, 2015
toilets here and there
empellon al pastor, 132 st. marks place, ny;
toby's estate, 44 charles st, ny;
dynamic vines, spa terminus market #5, london.
Sep 21, 2015
Sep 13, 2015
light effects
But most attractive to Seurat was the fact that at the viewing distance just before that where two complementary colours blend, the eye hovers on the verge of seeing two colors become one, and the paint surface seems to flicker as if luminous. This, Seurat believes, was how the artist could truly paint with light, capturing, for instance, the glow of sunlight on grass.
philip ball, bright earth
In the dot paintings, I took a large squarish canvas and painted it an even bright white ... Then I put on the dots, starting with very strong red dots, as rich as possible but only about the size of map pins, put them on very carefully, about one every quarter inch or so, such that they seemed neither too mechanically nor too crudely applied—either way they would have thereby drawn attention to themselves as patterns—concentrating them toward the center and then dispersing them less and less densely, missing one or two here and there, as they moved out toward the edge. Then I took the exact opposite color and put a green dot between every single pair of red dots, doing the same thing out to the edge, stopping the green maybe just a little before the red so that there was a slight halation of the two colors on the edge. But in the center they essentially canceled each other out, so that you didn't see either green or red but rather the energy generated by the interaction between the two.more from irwin here.
robert irwin, in seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees
Aug 31, 2015
Aug 17, 2015
Aug 16, 2015
Aug 6, 2015
root sounds
at the venice biennale this year, france's pavilion features a single site-specific, time-specific work by celeste boursier-mougenot. to install rêvolutions, he's taken the glass out of the skylights over the central atrium in the french pavilion—a vestibule leading to a large atrium from which three shallow galleries branch off—and painted everything white.
three large scotch pines and their root balls had been excavated entire from the ground and brought to the biennale, still embedded in earth. two flank the entrance to the pavilion; the third, in the atrium, has been fitted with a low-gear motor and moves, triggered by sap flow sensors, slowly and erratically around the space.
the galleries are dim, lit only by reflected light from the central atrium, and have been fitted with silicone foam stadium seating on which one may recline and watch the tree in the atrium on its perambulations while listening to the sound of the pavilion. voltmeters buried around the pavilion measure the voltage differential between the roots of certain trees and the surrounding soil; the pavilion's soundtrack is a real-time signal-processing transformation of that differential. somber, serene, and enveloping, this deep and continuous tone fills the entire space gently but completely.
a transcendent experience to lie in the half light, listening to root sounds.
Jul 3, 2015
lightness
Soon I became aware that between the facts of life that should have been my raw materials and the quick light touch I wanted for my writing, there was a gulf that cost me increasing effort to cross. Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world—qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them. At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no aspect of life.
italo calvino, lightness.
Jun 30, 2015
Jun 27, 2015
Jun 21, 2015
hardware and software
the traditional sherry bodega's solera system blends wines from casks representing many vintages. this allows each bodega to produce a set of consistent products despite the inherent variation across vintages. it takes years of continuous guided observation for bodega's foreman to learn the patterns in how casks of wine develop and what interventions in their development are possible and desirable.
the complexity and optionality of the solera system gives the capataz enormous freedom to move particular casks into and out of different criaderas and soleras; each capataz makes a slightly different set of intervention decisions; consistently made, the differences in these decisions generate distinctiveness in the bottled wine.
the physical bodega and the know-how of the capataz are, in combination, a large part of a technology for reproducing style in wine.
3 plaza cordobeses, 11408 - jerez de la frontera
Jun 10, 2015
meaning and knowledge
1. The stranger, therefore, approaches the other group as a newcomer in the true meaning of the term. At best he may be willing and able to share the present and the future with the approached group in vivid and immediate experience; under all circumstances, however, he remains excluded from such experiences of its past. Seen from the point of view of the approached group, he is a man without a history.
2. Every word and every sentence is, to borrow a term of William James, surrounded by 'fringes' connecting them, on the one hand, with past and future elements of the universe of discourse to which they pertain, and surrounding them, on the other hand, with a halo of emotional values and irrational implications which themselves remain ineffable. The fringes are the stuff poetry is made of; they are capable of being set of music but they are not translatable. There are in any language terms with several connotations. They, too, are noted in the dictionary. But, besides these standardized connotations, every element of the speech acquires its special secondary meaning derived from the context of the social environment within which it is used and, in addition, gets a special tinge from the actual occasion in which it is employed.
3. In any culture the highest rank is accorded to one of the three types of knowledge distinguished by [Max Scheler]—knowledge for the sake of domination (Beherrschungswissen), knowledge for the sake of knowing (Bildungswissen), knowledge for the sake of salvation (Heilswissen)—and therewith to one of the three types of men of knowledge: the scientist-technician, the sage, the saint. The social acceptance of this rank order determines the whole structure of the particular culture.
Alfred Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations
May 27, 2015
don't let your meat loaf
pass. saint-sébastien, 75011;
r. saint-jacques, 75005;
r. montorgueil, 75001.
May 20, 2015
May 11, 2015
May 5, 2015
california light and space
early morning (80mph) on I-94, dulzura, ca;
midday at sea port avenue on the salton sea, salton city, ca;
late afternoon on the montezuma-borrego highway, ranchita, ca;
sundown at torrey pines scenic drive, la jolla, ca.
May 1, 2015
Apr 28, 2015
Apr 5, 2015
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