I had a lot of fun with the perspectives.
Here is the street facade.
And the garden facade.
The plan.
And the context.
My Most Recent Project: An Architecture Foundation
This project was a school of architecture in the Gold Coast of Chicago. I had already designed the Orangery (tea house/cafe), and chapel. This was the culmination of the project, and my first multi-story building.
Wartime Author Mystery 'Solved'
From the BBC News
A former Luftwaffe fighter pilot may have ended the 64-year-old mystery surrounding the death of French writer and aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
The author of The Little Prince disappeared during a wartime aerial reconnaissance mission in July 1944.
In 2004, wreckage from his plane was found off the coast of Marseilles, but there was no indication of how he died.
Now former German pilot Horst Rippert says he fears he may have shot down the author - though he cannot be sure.
I presented myself as doing research and he said: 'You can stop researching now because I shot down Saint-Exupery'
French newspaper Le Figaro has published extracts of a book in which the former Messerschmitt pilot describes spotting a twin-tailed Lightning P-38 plane flying below him.
He went in pursuit and shot him down.
"I didn't see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to know that it was Saint-Exupery. I hoped and I still hope it wasn't him," he said.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery was best known for his book The Little Prince, a fantasy about a prince from an asteroid who explores the planets.
But his other works focused largely on his experiences in aviation. Although he moved to New York after the Nazis occupied France in 1940, he returned to join the Free French air force in Corsica.
His disappearance became one of the most enduring mysteries in post-war France.
Eventually, a bracelet belonging to him washed up in a fishing net off Marseille in 1998 and debris from his plane was later found by French diver Luc Vanrell.
With the debris was the engine of a German plane shot down a few months earlier.
Mr Vanrell then set to work with Lino von Gartzen of the Bavarian Society for Underwater Archaeology.
Mr von Gartzen told the BBC News website that he made 1,200 phone calls to former Luftwaffe pilots and their families in search of the man who shot down the French writer.
Finally, he was told about a man who had a clear memory of the events of 31 July 1944, the date Antoine de Saint-Exupery disappeared.
"I presented myself as doing research and he said: 'You can stop researching now because I shot down Saint-Exupery'."
Lino von Gartzen said it came as a big shock: "I never thought I would find who shot him down. I was quiet for some minutes as this was too much for me".
For another two years he continued to check Horst Rippert's story and is convinced by it.
"From my point of view as a professional historian it's a very, very good hypothesis and everything he told us seems to be true.
"He feels guilty and very, very sorry about it. He was very scared that the cheap press would massacre him."
In the published extracts, Mr Rippert describes being a fan of de Saint-Exupery's work. "In our youth, at school, we had all read him. We loved his books," he said.
After the war, Mr Rippert became a sports journalist. He is now 88.
Funny Games
I've been thinking about it and I've come to the conclusion that ridiculing the "bourgeois pigs" in their SUV's and ranch houses could be the ultimate sign of progressive modernity. That's what all the modernist architects, from Le Corbusier, to Walter Gropius, were most opposed to (and afraid of) in their architecture.
Wallen recently brought to my attention the new movie Funny Games starring Tim Roth (who I am a big fan of) and Naomi Watts. Apparently this is one of those sort of Eli Roth films were innocent people are subjected to all kinds of hideous torture. However, there is apparently something else going on as well in the film.
I think it is this mocking of the "bourgeois" inside us that is what this critic is talking about. The critic is telling us that in its very eschewing of the pornographic qualities of such films as "Hostel" and yet STILL finding that masochism titillating, it is nothing more than an exercise in ridiculing that well-off, middle class set who live in the suburbs, have a nice TV and get off on "Saw 8." Mocking that and yet still exploring the same fascination is perhaps worse than just participating in the mass bourgeois stupidity and blood thirstiness.
Now, if this movie is trying to point to the fact that this sort of gladiatorial blood lust is really nothing better than pornography than maybe it is good. That is perhaps what a good movie in this genre would do: point to the fact that it is evil. I guess we'll just have to see the movie then, won't we?
Is there still such a thing as a bourgeoisie in America or are we really all afraid of that thing inside each of us that doesn't get the new trend, or is to slow to keep up with our progression into post-post modernity?
Wallen recently brought to my attention the new movie Funny Games starring Tim Roth (who I am a big fan of) and Naomi Watts. Apparently this is one of those sort of Eli Roth films were innocent people are subjected to all kinds of hideous torture. However, there is apparently something else going on as well in the film.
I think it is this mocking of the "bourgeois" inside us that is what this critic is talking about. The critic is telling us that in its very eschewing of the pornographic qualities of such films as "Hostel" and yet STILL finding that masochism titillating, it is nothing more than an exercise in ridiculing that well-off, middle class set who live in the suburbs, have a nice TV and get off on "Saw 8." Mocking that and yet still exploring the same fascination is perhaps worse than just participating in the mass bourgeois stupidity and blood thirstiness.
Now, if this movie is trying to point to the fact that this sort of gladiatorial blood lust is really nothing better than pornography than maybe it is good. That is perhaps what a good movie in this genre would do: point to the fact that it is evil. I guess we'll just have to see the movie then, won't we?
Is there still such a thing as a bourgeoisie in America or are we really all afraid of that thing inside each of us that doesn't get the new trend, or is to slow to keep up with our progression into post-post modernity?
A Boy Named Sue, and a Theory of Names
From the New York Times March 11, 2008
By J. MARION TIERNEY *
During his 1969 concert at San Quentin prison, Johnny Cash proposed a paradigm shift in the field of developmental psychology. He used “A Boy Named Sue” to present two hypotheses:
1. A child with an awful name might grow up to be a relatively normal adult.
2. The parent who inflicted the name does not deserve to be executed.
I immediately welcomed the Boy Named Sue paradigm, although I realized that I might be biased by my middle name (Marion). Cash and his ambiguously named male collaborator, the lyricist Shel Silverstein, could offer only anecdotal evidence against decades of research suggesting that children with weird names were destined for places like San Quentin.
Studies showed that children with odd names got worse grades and were less popular than other classmates in elementary school. In college they were more likely to flunk out or become “psychoneurotic.” Prospective bosses spurned their résumés. They were overrepresented among emotionally disturbed children and psychiatric patients.
Some of these mental problems might have been genetic — what kind of parent picks a name like Golden Rule or Mary Mee? — but it was still bad news.
Today, though, the case for Mr. Cash’s theory looks much stronger, and I say this even after learning about Emma Royd and Post Office in a new book, “Bad Baby Names,” by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback.
By scouring census records from 1790 to 1930, Mr. Sherrod and Mr. Rayback discovered Garage Empty, Hysteria Johnson, King Arthur, Infinity Hubbard, Please Cope, Major Slaughter, Helen Troy, several Satans and a host of colleagues to the famed Ima Hogg (including Ima Pigg, Ima Muskrat, Ima Nut and Ima Hooker).
The authors also interviewed adults today who had survived names like Candy Stohr, Cash Guy, Mary Christmas, River Jordan and Rasp Berry. All of them, even Happy Day, seemed untraumatized.
“They were very proud of their names, almost overly proud,” Mr. Sherrod said. “We asked if that was a reaction to getting pummeled when they were little, but they said they didn’t get that much ribbing. They did get a little tired of hearing the same jokes, but they liked having an unusual name because it made them stand out.”
Not too much ribbing? That surprised me, because I had vivid memories of playground serenades to my middle name: “Marion . . . Madam Librarian!” (My tormentors didn’t care that the “Music Man” librarian spelled her name with an “a.”) But after I looked at experiments in the post-Sue era by revisionists like Kenneth Steele and Wayne Hensley, it seemed names weren’t so important after all.
When people were asked to rate the physical attractiveness and character of someone in a photograph, it didn’t matter much if that someone was assigned an “undesirable” name. Once people could see a face, they rated an Oswald, Myron, Harriet or Hazel about the same as a face with a “desirable” name like David, Gregory, Jennifer or Christine.
Other researchers found that children with unusual names were more likely to have poorer and less educated parents, handicaps that explained their problems in school. Martin Ford and other psychologists reported, after controlling for race and ethnicity, that children with unusual names did as well as others in school. The economists Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt reached a similar conclusion after controlling for socioeconomic variables in a study of black children with distinctive names.
“Names only have a significant influence when that is the only thing you know about the person,” said Dr. Ford, a developmental psychologist at George Mason University. “Add a picture, and the impact of the name recedes. Add information about personality, motivation and ability, and the impact of the name shrinks to minimal significance.”
But even if a bad name doesn’t doom a child, why would any parent christen an infant Ogre? Mr. Sherrod found several of them, along with children named Ghoul, Gorgon, Medusa, Hades, Lucifer and every deadly sin except Gluttony (his favorite was Wrath Gordon).
You can sort of understand parents’ affection for the sound of Chimera Griffin, but Monster Moor and Goblin Fester? Or Cheese Ceaser and Leper Priest? What provokes current celebrities to name their children Sage Moonblood Stallone and Speck Wildhorse Mellencamp?
“Today it’s all about individuality,” Mr. Sherrod said. “In the past, there was more of a sense of humor, probably because fathers had more say in the names.” He said the waning influence of fathers might explain why there are no longer so many names like Nice Deal, Butcher Baker, Lotta Beers and Good Bye, although some dads still try.
“I can’t tell you,” Mr. Sherrod said, “how often I’ve heard guys who wanted their kid to be able to say truthfully, ‘Danger is my middle name.’ But their wives absolutely refused.”
Is it possible — I’m trying to be kind to these humor-challenged fathers — that they think Danger would be a character-building experience? Could there be anything to the paternal rationale offered in Johnny Cash’s song, the one that stopped Sue from killing his father: “I knew you’d have to get tough or die, and it’s the name that helped to make you strong”?
I sought an answer from Cleveland Kent Evans — not because he might have gotten into fights defending Cleveland, but because he’s a psychologist and past president of the American Names Society. Dr. Evans, a professor at Bellevue University in Nebraska, said there is evidence for the character-building theory from psychologists like Richard Zweigenhaft, but it doesn’t work exactly as Sue’s father imagined it.
“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr. Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative — no psychological or social problems — or any correlations with either masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more, but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”
After hearing that, I began to reconsider my own name. Although I’d never shared Sue’s Oedipal impulse — I realized my father couldn’t have anticipated “Music Man” — I’d never appreciated those playground serenades, either. But maybe they served some purpose after all. So today, to celebrate the Boy Named Sue paradigm shift, I’m using my middle name in my byline for the first time.
Also for the last time. As Sue realized when it came time to name his own son, you can take a theory only so far.
* This article is written by John Tierney
By J. MARION TIERNEY *
During his 1969 concert at San Quentin prison, Johnny Cash proposed a paradigm shift in the field of developmental psychology. He used “A Boy Named Sue” to present two hypotheses:
1. A child with an awful name might grow up to be a relatively normal adult.
2. The parent who inflicted the name does not deserve to be executed.
I immediately welcomed the Boy Named Sue paradigm, although I realized that I might be biased by my middle name (Marion). Cash and his ambiguously named male collaborator, the lyricist Shel Silverstein, could offer only anecdotal evidence against decades of research suggesting that children with weird names were destined for places like San Quentin.
Studies showed that children with odd names got worse grades and were less popular than other classmates in elementary school. In college they were more likely to flunk out or become “psychoneurotic.” Prospective bosses spurned their résumés. They were overrepresented among emotionally disturbed children and psychiatric patients.
Some of these mental problems might have been genetic — what kind of parent picks a name like Golden Rule or Mary Mee? — but it was still bad news.
Today, though, the case for Mr. Cash’s theory looks much stronger, and I say this even after learning about Emma Royd and Post Office in a new book, “Bad Baby Names,” by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback.
By scouring census records from 1790 to 1930, Mr. Sherrod and Mr. Rayback discovered Garage Empty, Hysteria Johnson, King Arthur, Infinity Hubbard, Please Cope, Major Slaughter, Helen Troy, several Satans and a host of colleagues to the famed Ima Hogg (including Ima Pigg, Ima Muskrat, Ima Nut and Ima Hooker).
The authors also interviewed adults today who had survived names like Candy Stohr, Cash Guy, Mary Christmas, River Jordan and Rasp Berry. All of them, even Happy Day, seemed untraumatized.
“They were very proud of their names, almost overly proud,” Mr. Sherrod said. “We asked if that was a reaction to getting pummeled when they were little, but they said they didn’t get that much ribbing. They did get a little tired of hearing the same jokes, but they liked having an unusual name because it made them stand out.”
Not too much ribbing? That surprised me, because I had vivid memories of playground serenades to my middle name: “Marion . . . Madam Librarian!” (My tormentors didn’t care that the “Music Man” librarian spelled her name with an “a.”) But after I looked at experiments in the post-Sue era by revisionists like Kenneth Steele and Wayne Hensley, it seemed names weren’t so important after all.
When people were asked to rate the physical attractiveness and character of someone in a photograph, it didn’t matter much if that someone was assigned an “undesirable” name. Once people could see a face, they rated an Oswald, Myron, Harriet or Hazel about the same as a face with a “desirable” name like David, Gregory, Jennifer or Christine.
Other researchers found that children with unusual names were more likely to have poorer and less educated parents, handicaps that explained their problems in school. Martin Ford and other psychologists reported, after controlling for race and ethnicity, that children with unusual names did as well as others in school. The economists Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt reached a similar conclusion after controlling for socioeconomic variables in a study of black children with distinctive names.
“Names only have a significant influence when that is the only thing you know about the person,” said Dr. Ford, a developmental psychologist at George Mason University. “Add a picture, and the impact of the name recedes. Add information about personality, motivation and ability, and the impact of the name shrinks to minimal significance.”
But even if a bad name doesn’t doom a child, why would any parent christen an infant Ogre? Mr. Sherrod found several of them, along with children named Ghoul, Gorgon, Medusa, Hades, Lucifer and every deadly sin except Gluttony (his favorite was Wrath Gordon).
You can sort of understand parents’ affection for the sound of Chimera Griffin, but Monster Moor and Goblin Fester? Or Cheese Ceaser and Leper Priest? What provokes current celebrities to name their children Sage Moonblood Stallone and Speck Wildhorse Mellencamp?
“Today it’s all about individuality,” Mr. Sherrod said. “In the past, there was more of a sense of humor, probably because fathers had more say in the names.” He said the waning influence of fathers might explain why there are no longer so many names like Nice Deal, Butcher Baker, Lotta Beers and Good Bye, although some dads still try.
“I can’t tell you,” Mr. Sherrod said, “how often I’ve heard guys who wanted their kid to be able to say truthfully, ‘Danger is my middle name.’ But their wives absolutely refused.”
Is it possible — I’m trying to be kind to these humor-challenged fathers — that they think Danger would be a character-building experience? Could there be anything to the paternal rationale offered in Johnny Cash’s song, the one that stopped Sue from killing his father: “I knew you’d have to get tough or die, and it’s the name that helped to make you strong”?
I sought an answer from Cleveland Kent Evans — not because he might have gotten into fights defending Cleveland, but because he’s a psychologist and past president of the American Names Society. Dr. Evans, a professor at Bellevue University in Nebraska, said there is evidence for the character-building theory from psychologists like Richard Zweigenhaft, but it doesn’t work exactly as Sue’s father imagined it.
“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr. Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative — no psychological or social problems — or any correlations with either masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more, but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”
After hearing that, I began to reconsider my own name. Although I’d never shared Sue’s Oedipal impulse — I realized my father couldn’t have anticipated “Music Man” — I’d never appreciated those playground serenades, either. But maybe they served some purpose after all. So today, to celebrate the Boy Named Sue paradigm shift, I’m using my middle name in my byline for the first time.
Also for the last time. As Sue realized when it came time to name his own son, you can take a theory only so far.
* This article is written by John Tierney
Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location
Neil Neches, on a No. 5 train, underneath the placard that has earned him plaudits for his proper use of the semicolon.By SAM ROBERTS
New Yo9rk Times February 18, 2008
It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.
“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”
Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.
Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.
“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.”
In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.
Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr. Neches, the 55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager, learned them, before graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later received a master’s degree in creative writing.
But, whatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use them because they never learned how.
In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.
“I thought at first somebody was complaining,” he said.
One of the school system’s most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)
But the rules of grammar are routinely violated on both sides of the law.
People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers. In 2004, a court in San Francisco rejected a conservative group’s challenge to a statute allowing gay marriage because the operative phrases were separated incorrectly by a semicolon instead of by the proper conjunction.
Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, pronounced the subway poster’s use of the semicolon to be “impeccable.”
Lynne Truss, author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” called it a “lovely example” of proper punctuation.
Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, praised the “burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places.”
Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before retiring, opined, “The semicolon is correct, though I’d have used a colon, which I think would be a bit more sophisticated in that sentence.”
The linguist Noam Chomsky sniffed, “I suppose Bush would claim it’s the effect of No Child Left Behind.”
New York City Transit’s unintended agenda notwithstanding, e-mail messages and text-messaging may jeopardize the last vestiges of semicolons. They still live on, though, in emoticons, those graphic emblems of our grins, grimaces and other facial expressions.
The semicolon, befittingly, symbolizes a wink.
A Weather of Feeling
Poets are often intelligent men and they are entitled to their thoughts; but intellectual pioneering and the construction of new thought systems are not their special function. Aeschylus's Oresteia was not a contribution to Athenian legal theory; Dante's Comedia gave us no new theology; and Shakespeare's history plays added no fresh concepts to the political thought of his time.
What poetry does with ideas is to redeem them from abstraction and submerge them in sensibility; it embodies them in persons and things and surrounds them with a weather of feeling; it thereby tests the ability of any ideas to consort with human nature in its contemporary condition. Is it possible, for example, to speak intelligibly of angels in the modern world? Will the psyche of the modern reader consent to be called a soul?
Richard Wilbur from the essay On my own work
What poetry does with ideas is to redeem them from abstraction and submerge them in sensibility; it embodies them in persons and things and surrounds them with a weather of feeling; it thereby tests the ability of any ideas to consort with human nature in its contemporary condition. Is it possible, for example, to speak intelligibly of angels in the modern world? Will the psyche of the modern reader consent to be called a soul?
Richard Wilbur from the essay On my own work
The torment of waiting for parts
So, I still need:
The Za50
The Moto-Matic "San Francisco" exhaust
The Vintage Cosmo "bumstop" seat
The boost bottle
The motorcycle headlight
And the tear-drop trailer tail light
Most importantly, I need the seat so I can weld up some mounts for it. Then I can send the whole thing off to be welded (as in professionally).
The Za50
The Moto-Matic "San Francisco" exhaust
The Vintage Cosmo "bumstop" seat
The boost bottle
The motorcycle headlight
And the tear-drop trailer tail light
Most importantly, I need the seat so I can weld up some mounts for it. Then I can send the whole thing off to be welded (as in professionally).
Finally, Pictures of the Puchavus
So this weekend some folks from the Ghost Riders and the Guns came down to the shop and we spent all day Saturday and Sunday working on bikes. I was in the zone so to speak. I mocked it up and it certainly looks mean, although it is very, very small, and ever so low to the road. (notice the size of the concrete blocks)
Devin and I (read Devin) tack-welded the engine mounts to the frame, I drilled them out and the engine seems to fit very well. The chain even seems to allign better than I could have expected (with the too-good-for-measurements stance I took on fabricating the mounts). Here's a not so good picture of the mounted engine showing the offset from the frame (and Motion Left welding prowess).
I cut the drop bars short to fit the original Batavus grips and levers which are really appropriate lookin. Next I made a speedo mount out of sheet metal, set slightly to the side. I will wrap this in checkered tape in classic cafe bike form. I also ground off the headlight mounts as I would like to put a larger motorcycle headlight on, plus if I end up getting clip-ons it wouldn't have worked with the mounts.
Overall, the look is far better than I had expected. I'm almost falling in love with the rough, unpainted look it has now, although it will look better powder coated black, especially with the seat. With fat racing flats this thing is going to be downright scary, or at least as scary as something that's about 2 and a half feet tall and 4 feet long can be! Oh, and with a Homoet-style exhaust it is even better.
Prepare to be destroyed by 50 ridiculous Puchavistic cc's!
Devin and I (read Devin) tack-welded the engine mounts to the frame, I drilled them out and the engine seems to fit very well. The chain even seems to allign better than I could have expected (with the too-good-for-measurements stance I took on fabricating the mounts). Here's a not so good picture of the mounted engine showing the offset from the frame (and Motion Left welding prowess).
I cut the drop bars short to fit the original Batavus grips and levers which are really appropriate lookin. Next I made a speedo mount out of sheet metal, set slightly to the side. I will wrap this in checkered tape in classic cafe bike form. I also ground off the headlight mounts as I would like to put a larger motorcycle headlight on, plus if I end up getting clip-ons it wouldn't have worked with the mounts.
Overall, the look is far better than I had expected. I'm almost falling in love with the rough, unpainted look it has now, although it will look better powder coated black, especially with the seat. With fat racing flats this thing is going to be downright scary, or at least as scary as something that's about 2 and a half feet tall and 4 feet long can be! Oh, and with a Homoet-style exhaust it is even better.
Prepare to be destroyed by 50 ridiculous Puchavistic cc's!
Borromini's suicide
I have been wounded like this since about half past eight this morning and I will tell you how it happened. I had been feeling ill since the feast of the Magdalene [22 July] and had not been out on account of my illness except on Saturday and Sunday when I went to S. Giovanni [dei Fiorentini] for the Jubilee. Last night the idea came to me of making my will and writing it out with my own hand, and I began to write it about an hour after supper and I went on writing with a pencil till about three in the morning. Messer Francesco Massari my young servant ... who sleeps in the room next door to look after me and had already gone to bed, seeing that I was still writing and had not put out the light, called to me, 'Signor Cavaliere, you ought to put out the light and go to sleep because it is late and the doctor wants you to sleep.' I replied that I should have to light the lamp again when I woke up and he answered: 'Put it out because I'll light it again when you wake up'; and so I stopped writing, put away the paper on which I had written a little and the pencil with which I was writing, put out the light and went to sleep. About five or six I woke up and called to Francesco and told him to light the lamp, and he answered: 'Signor, no'. And hearing this reply I suddenly became impatient and began to wonder how I could do myself some bodily harm, as Francesco had refused to give me a light; and I remained in that state till about half past eight, when I remembered that I had a sword in the room at the head of the bed, hanging among the consecrated candles, and, my impatience at not having a light growing greater, in despair I took the sword and pulling it out of the scabbard leant the hilt on the bed and put the point to my side and then fell on it with such force that it ran into my body, from one side to the other, and in falling on the sword I fell on to the floor with the sword run through my body and because of my wound I began to scream, and so Francesco ran in and opened the window, through which light was coming, and found me lying on the floor, and he with others whom he had called pulled the sword out of my side and put me on the bed; and this is how I came to be wounded.
(taken from Anthony Blunt, Borromini, pp. 208-209.)
Francesco Borromini would die as a result of his self inflicted wound. He was buried in S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, as the brothers at San Carlino (where he had wished to be buried and had spent much of his life as the architect) would not permit a suicide to be buried in their church.
(taken from Anthony Blunt, Borromini, pp. 208-209.)
Francesco Borromini would die as a result of his self inflicted wound. He was buried in S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, as the brothers at San Carlino (where he had wished to be buried and had spent much of his life as the architect) would not permit a suicide to be buried in their church.
Bundles of Inconsistency
"If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!"
Jonathan Swift
Very true, but I also think that there is much in a man's inner heart that is unmoved by time and age (probably to his detriment). Perhaps it is the willingness with which we allow ourselves to change, that is constant.
Jonathan Swift
Very true, but I also think that there is much in a man's inner heart that is unmoved by time and age (probably to his detriment). Perhaps it is the willingness with which we allow ourselves to change, that is constant.
Well put, Mr. Walton
August the 9th, 1683.
In the name of God Amen. I Izaak Walton the elder of Winchester being this present day in the neintyeth yeare of my age and in perfect memory for wich praysed be God: but Considering how sodainly I may be deprived of boeth doe therfore make this my last will and testament as followeth. And first I doe [declare] my beleife to be that their is only one God who hath made the whole world and me and all mankinde to whome I shall give an acount of all my actions which are not to be justified, but I hope pardoned for the merits of my saviour Jesus.--And because [the profession of] Cristianity does at this time, seime to be subdevided into papist and protestant, I take it to be at least convenient to declare my beleife to be in all poynts of faith, as the Church of England now professeth. And this I doe the rather, because of a very long and very trew friendship with some of the Roman Church.
Me too! I mean, I'm not neinety...
In the name of God Amen. I Izaak Walton the elder of Winchester being this present day in the neintyeth yeare of my age and in perfect memory for wich praysed be God: but Considering how sodainly I may be deprived of boeth doe therfore make this my last will and testament as followeth. And first I doe [declare] my beleife to be that their is only one God who hath made the whole world and me and all mankinde to whome I shall give an acount of all my actions which are not to be justified, but I hope pardoned for the merits of my saviour Jesus.--And because [the profession of] Cristianity does at this time, seime to be subdevided into papist and protestant, I take it to be at least convenient to declare my beleife to be in all poynts of faith, as the Church of England now professeth. And this I doe the rather, because of a very long and very trew friendship with some of the Roman Church.
Me too! I mean, I'm not neinety...
Puchavus 50cc Cafe Racer... continued.
As of sunday I have finished grinding out the frame to fit the Za50. I also fabricated six engine mounts to be welded to the frame. The steel I used was quite thick so there will be no risk of the engine torquing off!
The engine mounts on the right side of the bike all have to be shifted out slightly, which made for some interesting work. I did this by bending the metel in a vice. I ground the corners down around where they will be bolted to the engine.The order for the seat, simonini exhaust, boost bottle, Sava 2.5" tires and engine will be going out this week.
Next will be the fabrication of seat mounts, and getting everything welded.
And then the powder coating....black. And then, well a lot.
The Monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette
“Concrete is a material that does not cheat; it replaces, it cuts out the need for that trickster – coating. Béton Bruts says: I am concrete.” -Le Corbusier
Oh, what dramatic words Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris!
Oh, what dramatic words Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris!
It is not surprising that Le Corbusier, should have designed a monastery. After all, Modernists have often claimed precedents in the great Cistercian abbeys of the Middle Ages such as Fontaine, whose bleak, unfinished walls and stubborn austerity reflect the strict self-denial of its order. Perhaps more similarities have been found between this genre of architecture and modernism than actually exist if we were to understand the underlying principals of Christianity and those of a historicist ideology, nonetheless, La Tourette is a place where this exercise in concrete manages to at least not insult its function and role. (I'm still thinking about that last statement.
The Dominican monastery of La Tourette is located above the town of L’Arbresle about 25 kilometers outside of Lyon. This was Le Corbusier’s last major building and was begun in 1953. Though a staunch atheist, Le Corbusier designed several religious buildings. One can only ask why he was hired to do them, as his entire theory of architecture was diametrically opposed to religion. Regardless, the monastery still stands as a bleak monument to the dubious architectural innovations of the 20th century, and as a Mecca for aging modernist architects.
The form of the building is that of a large rectangle supported on piers, and located on a sloping hill such that the back of the building is at ground level and the front is some 25 feet above the field it looms over. The plan is laid out as a simple rectangle surrounding an open courtyard, yet upon entering the building, the complicated and intricate fluidity of the promenade, circulation and seemingly randomly placed structures is difficult to make sense of. Essentially, it is a U-shaped cell block for the monks closed off by the more solid chapel structure. The U shape puts the monk’s cells on the outside with circulation running around the inside and almost entirely open to the inside space through the use of large windows which use concrete in patterns which Le Corbusier designed after the music of the monk’s daily services.
The building is approached from the North by its least eloquent side and at the top – the wrong way round as it were. In the words of the modernists "the imposing wall of the church suddenly rises up against the sunlight, recalling (alluding to?) images of ancient walled abbeys." 
From here we gain a view of the interior of the “cloister" and the cell block’s interior with its many windows. Indeed, the structure is imposing with its brutal concrete seeming to the viewer like a bunker or massive bridge pier.
The building is constructed almost entirely of reinforced concrete, used both structurally, and as venire structure supported from large “pilotis” as Le Corbusier called them, or central columns which raised the building off the ground and freed the walls of the façade for long strip windows. These pilotis unlock glimpses of the "central void" containing the enclosed cloister whose form bears none of the features of traditional cloisters; instead, one follows an internal “promenade intricately interwoven with diverse components contrasting sharply with the underlying simplicity of the plan."
What makes this a good example of the use of concrete is that it uses concrete as a finish material. Nowhere in this structure is there a use of a finish material or coating for the concrete that is the structure. From the “pilotis” that support the building to the walls and even windows, concrete is used in its raw unfinished form.Béton bruts is a concrete finish that is achieved by using wooden planks as the form for the concrete. This leaves the concrete with a rough finish with the direct imprint of the sawn wood. Often this can be so convincing that if painted it can look just like weatherboarding or panels. This was not the intent of le Corbusier. He sought a sincerity in an architecture that did not “lie.” Throughout La Tourette béton bruts is used to give the concrete as rough a texture as possible in an effort to not only let us know it is concrete, but to never let us forget it. Because the concrete used these forms to get the rough finish, it was necessarily poured in place concrete. Depending on the forms that the concrete was to take it was smoothed to greater or lesser degrees. Here is an example of béton brut where we can see how the final finish reflects the formwork of the concrete.
The concrete is used right up to the details, formed up even to hold the paines of glass to be found in most of the windows.
Overall, the use of concrete in this building is not so amazing simply in its structural qualities. The “pilotis” system had been used many times by Le Corbusier. Rather, it was its combination of structure and aesthetics into a single unmasked entity: the building itself. The very austerity and starkness of the building was seen as beautiful and appropriate to its function as a place of self denial and meditation.
While parts of the building retain the strict form of the rectangle, others break free of straight lines and achieve strange contours and curves, such as these light passages in ceilings of the side chapels.
The concrete is used right up to the details, formed up even to hold the paines of glass to be found in most of the windows. Overall, the use of concrete in this building is not so amazing simply in its structural qualities. The “pilotis” system had been used many times by Le Corbusier. Rather, it was its combination of structure and aesthetics into a single unmasked entity: the building itself. The very austerity and starkness of the building was seen as beautiful and appropriate to its function as a place of self denial and meditation. Here is a watercolour I did of La Tourette quand j'avais six ans!
Les Ux
From The Times
September 29, 2007
Underground ‘terrorists’ with a mission to save city’s neglected heritage
By day, Lazar Kunstmann is a typically avant-garde Parisian, an urbane, well-spoken video film editor who hangs out in the fashionable Latin Quarter. By night he inhabits a strange and secret world with its base in the tunnels beneath the French capital – the world of the urban explorers.
Mr Kunstmann belongs to les UX, a clandestine network that is on a mission to discover and exploit the city’s neglected underworld. The urban explorers put on film shows in underground galleries, restore medieval crypts and break into monuments after dark to organise plays and readings. In the eyes of their supporters, they are the white knights of modern culture, renovating forgotten buildings and staging artistic events beyond the reach of a stifling civil service.
The authorities view them differently: as the dark side of the City of Light – irresponsible, paranoid subversives whose actions could serve as a model for terrorists. A police unit has been trained to track les UX through the sewers, catacombs and old quarries that are their pathways under Paris. Prosecutors have been instructed to file charges whenever feasible.
The stand-off is symbolic of French society: a rigorous bureaucracy on the surface with a bizarre subculture below.
Mr Kunstmann, a spokesman for the movement, met The Times last week in the back room of a bar in central Paris. Beside him sat a thin, austere-looking woman who sipped a beer, gave her name only as Lanso and barely said a word throughout the interview.
From time to time, however, she whispered into Mr Kunstmann’s ear and he relayed the message. “We are the counterpoint to an era where everything is slow and complicated,” he said. “It’s very difficult to get anything done through official channels. If you want to do it, you have to be clandestine.”
Mr Kunstmann said that les UX had 150 or so members divided into about ten branches.One group, which is all-female, specialises in “infiltration” – getting into museums after hours, finding a way through underground electric or gas networks and shutting down alarms. Another runs an internal message system and a coded, digital radio network accessible only to members.
A third group provides a database, a fourth organises subterranean shows and a fifth takes photographs of them. Mr Kunstmann refused to talk about the other groups.
He did, however, say that Lanso was the leader of a branch called the Untergunther – the name comes from a German record whose music served as an alarm on an early mission – which specialised in restoration. This group, whose members include architects and historians, rebuilt an abandoned 100-year-old French government bunker and renovated a 12th-century crypt, he said. They claim to be motivated by a desire to preserve Paris’s heritage.
Last year the Untergunther spent months hidden in the Panthéon, the Parisian mausoleum that holds France’s greatest citizens, where they repaired a clock that had been left to rust. Slipping in at closing time every evening – French television said that they had their own set of keys – they set up a workshop hidden behind mock wooden crates at the top of the monument. The security guards never found it. The Untergunther used a professional clockmaker, Jean-Baptiste Viot, to mend the 150-year-old mechanism.
When the clock began working again, officials were horrified. The Centre for National Monuments confirmed that the clock had been repaired but said that the authority had begun legal action against the Untergunther. Under official investigation for breaking and entry, its members face a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a €15,000 (£10,500) fine.
“We could go down in legal history as the first people ever to be prosecuted for repairing a clock,” said Mr Kunstmann. But he was unrepentant.
“In any other country, a monument such as the Panthéon would be maintained in a perfect state. But not in France. Here, if we hadn’t restored the clock, no one else would have bothered.”
September 29, 2007
Underground ‘terrorists’ with a mission to save city’s neglected heritage
By day, Lazar Kunstmann is a typically avant-garde Parisian, an urbane, well-spoken video film editor who hangs out in the fashionable Latin Quarter. By night he inhabits a strange and secret world with its base in the tunnels beneath the French capital – the world of the urban explorers.Mr Kunstmann belongs to les UX, a clandestine network that is on a mission to discover and exploit the city’s neglected underworld. The urban explorers put on film shows in underground galleries, restore medieval crypts and break into monuments after dark to organise plays and readings. In the eyes of their supporters, they are the white knights of modern culture, renovating forgotten buildings and staging artistic events beyond the reach of a stifling civil service.
The authorities view them differently: as the dark side of the City of Light – irresponsible, paranoid subversives whose actions could serve as a model for terrorists. A police unit has been trained to track les UX through the sewers, catacombs and old quarries that are their pathways under Paris. Prosecutors have been instructed to file charges whenever feasible.
The stand-off is symbolic of French society: a rigorous bureaucracy on the surface with a bizarre subculture below.
Mr Kunstmann, a spokesman for the movement, met The Times last week in the back room of a bar in central Paris. Beside him sat a thin, austere-looking woman who sipped a beer, gave her name only as Lanso and barely said a word throughout the interview.
From time to time, however, she whispered into Mr Kunstmann’s ear and he relayed the message. “We are the counterpoint to an era where everything is slow and complicated,” he said. “It’s very difficult to get anything done through official channels. If you want to do it, you have to be clandestine.”
Mr Kunstmann said that les UX had 150 or so members divided into about ten branches.One group, which is all-female, specialises in “infiltration” – getting into museums after hours, finding a way through underground electric or gas networks and shutting down alarms. Another runs an internal message system and a coded, digital radio network accessible only to members.
A third group provides a database, a fourth organises subterranean shows and a fifth takes photographs of them. Mr Kunstmann refused to talk about the other groups.
He did, however, say that Lanso was the leader of a branch called the Untergunther – the name comes from a German record whose music served as an alarm on an early mission – which specialised in restoration. This group, whose members include architects and historians, rebuilt an abandoned 100-year-old French government bunker and renovated a 12th-century crypt, he said. They claim to be motivated by a desire to preserve Paris’s heritage.
Last year the Untergunther spent months hidden in the Panthéon, the Parisian mausoleum that holds France’s greatest citizens, where they repaired a clock that had been left to rust. Slipping in at closing time every evening – French television said that they had their own set of keys – they set up a workshop hidden behind mock wooden crates at the top of the monument. The security guards never found it. The Untergunther used a professional clockmaker, Jean-Baptiste Viot, to mend the 150-year-old mechanism.
When the clock began working again, officials were horrified. The Centre for National Monuments confirmed that the clock had been repaired but said that the authority had begun legal action against the Untergunther. Under official investigation for breaking and entry, its members face a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a €15,000 (£10,500) fine.
“We could go down in legal history as the first people ever to be prosecuted for repairing a clock,” said Mr Kunstmann. But he was unrepentant.
“In any other country, a monument such as the Panthéon would be maintained in a perfect state. But not in France. Here, if we hadn’t restored the clock, no one else would have bothered.”
Movie Update: Bella
I just saw Bella. It wasn't that bad. I thought I was in for an all out anti-abortion movie from what I had heard. I'd say there are some serious plot issues, but overall I was amazed at how graceful the film was. Rather than coming at the issue defensively, or with a fight in mind the film was about more than the simple choice to have a child or not. I haven't seen any of the rescent movies that are out, which apparently seem to lean toward the pro-life camp (Juno, Knocked Up), but this one certainly handled it in a way that at least allowed for discussion.
From Curious Expeditions
Interesting. It kind of stinks they blew a hole in the side of the cave. I wonder who the loon was who decided to see if he could swim under a cliff and found it. Notice Andrew bird playing in the background... odd.
Music That Most People Listen To
Almost all music in the mainstream is awful. That said, I’m not one to say I’d rather keep the stuff I like unknown. However, it is a kind of sinking feeling when something you have always loved gets popular on a broad scale. The same thing is true of books or movies or anything. You can’t help but think it will become polluted with celebrity, or whatever. Or you're just selfish. Actually, I'm pretty sure that's how it is with me.
Anyway, the music that is popular today isn't of course bad just because it is popular. It's bad because it is completely cut off from any kind of true tradition of music. It is all about making people “feel” and is kitch tripe if we were to compare it with what other era’s had; music that one had to interact with personally and intellectually as well as emotionally. There is nothing personal about celebrity, and the thousands of little digital concerts that are being playedout on the zombie like populace’s ipods. All of which might imply that the fault is that of recording music at all.
Anyway, the music that is popular today isn't of course bad just because it is popular. It's bad because it is completely cut off from any kind of true tradition of music. It is all about making people “feel” and is kitch tripe if we were to compare it with what other era’s had; music that one had to interact with personally and intellectually as well as emotionally. There is nothing personal about celebrity, and the thousands of little digital concerts that are being playedout on the zombie like populace’s ipods. All of which might imply that the fault is that of recording music at all.
Before and After Devin's Magical Powers
This was before.....
Now this is after!!!
It still amazes me.
Now this is after!!! It still amazes me. Relativity
What if tragedy is about trying to maintain as much honour as possible in dishonourable circumstances? Would comedy then be being a little bit dishonourable in an honourable situation? How clever...
Death Masks
This is Pascal's death mask. He looks like a pretty nice guy. I think I would have enjoyed meeting him.
This is Voltaire's death mask. Pretty scary... just like the man. He would have his eyes open. What a freak. He reminds me of Dr. Finkelstein in The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Aedicule Analytique
Here is an Analytique I did recently in studio. It is a design for a aedicule to go on the side of an orangerie I designed later.
(Notice my Garelli)
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