Before a city becomes a thing of steel, concrete and glass it is a theater of visions in conflict.
As a city ages, the visions do not die but come up against the physical and ideological resistance of the place and its people. The city we see today is the direct result of radical visions, gradually changing the way the future is realized. This is an account of a Manhattan that could have been – might have been. A phantasmagorical Manhattan where the visionary meets the everyday – the absurd and the sublime. The island as we know it is but a pale reflection of a city designed by visionaries – a city of mad, incongruous utopias.
Tag: history
Kickstarter: The American Drive-in Movie Theater by Carl Weese
The American Drive-in Movie Theater by Carl Weese — Kickstarter:
The drive-in movie theater is an iconic feature of the American landscape, perhaps the ultimate vernacular architecture. At the peak in 1958 more than four thousand of them were scattered across every corner of North America. There was a great die-off in the 1970s, mainly because of rising property values. Theater owners have told me, “Nobody gets rich from a drive-in theater, unless they sell the land to Walmart.” 466 drive-ins were still operating last summer. The drive-in is also a uniquely North American institution—they are virtually unknown elsewhere.
Barry Lyndon: Use of the Mitchell BNC Camera and Zeiss Lenses
Interviewees reminisce on how Stanley Kubrick acquired the Mitchell BNC cameras and used them, in conjunction with NASA Zeiss lenses, to film “Barry Lyndon” using natural light.
Kubrick used three NASA-built 50mm f0.7 aperture lens so he could shoot literally by candlelight. f0.7! That’s two full stops faster than any lens you can get today.
via Barry Lyndon: Use of the Mitchell BNC Camera and Zeiss Lenses – YouTube.
Robin Hood Gardens slated for Demolition
Four years ago Gordon Brown wants to demolish Robin Hood Gardens – the brutalist council housing designed by Alison and Peter Smithson. Even a successful design competition could not spare its fate. Londonist updates us on the status of Robin Hood Gardens:
Opened in 1972, the estate, formed of two long concrete blocks designed by husband and wife team Alison and Peter Smithson (also responsible for the Economist building in Piccadilly) had become a cause célèbre in recent years, ever since tearing it down was first proposed in 2008. Architects Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers, and former Guardian architecture critic Jonathan Glancey, joined a campaign by Building Design magazine to save the estate, and it was the subject of an exhibition. However, the decision not to award it listed status sounded the death knell.
Soon we will only have a Flickr set of photos to remember this strange, and alienating building.
Hugh Ferriss – Hoover Dam
… Hugh Ferriss – Hoover Dam, a photo by x-ray delta one on Flickr.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History
Towers of Dreams: One Ended in Nightmare:
But they’re both classic examples of modern architecture, the kind Mr. Jencks, among countless others, left for dead: superblocks of brick and concrete high rises scattered across grassy plots, so-called towers in the park, descended from Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City.” The words “housing project” instantly conjure them up.
Alienating, penitential breeding grounds for vandalism and violence: that became the tower in the park’s epitaph. But Penn South, with its stolid redbrick, concrete-slab housing stock, is clearly a safe, successful place. In this case the architecture works. In St. Louis, where the architectural scheme was the same, what killed Pruitt-Igoe was not its bricks and mortar. (Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Towers, was the architect.)
New York in the 1980s
Hole in Manhattan Bridge walkway (1980), a photo by stevensiegel260 on Flickr.
Holy shit: Hole in Manhattan Bridge walkway.
Check out the other photos of New York in the 1980s.
Last of the Mohicans
Last of the Mohicans is 97 minutes of dimly-lit landscapes with overwrought dialog, 15 minutes of pure awesome, followed by 5 minutes of guilt.
Evergreen National Highway
Evergreen National Highway was an informal auto trail stretching from Portland, Oregon, to El Paso, Texasthat existed in the United States and Canada in the early part of the 20th century. In the mid-to-late 1920s, the auto trails were essentially replaced in the United States with the system of numbered U.S. Highways.
Above is a thumbnail of the Ohio section of the 1918 AAA Map of transcontinental routes, showing the Lincoln Highway (full route shown below), where my extended family live. As you can see, prior to 1926, not only was the physical infrastructure poor, but the graphical wayfinding was complex and equally poor.
