The mess that is the once-and-future Tavern on the Green continues to be messy. As the city awaits bids for new restaurateurs to take over the fabled Central Park eatery a trickle of new info the project has come out. As the city implied in its Request For Proposals for the space, they are taking it back to the basics . The 1940s basics. [ more › ]
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Tavern On The Green Is Going Back In Time With Retro Design
James Franco is back on Twitter, it seems, with his newly created James Franco TV handle. That is, if it’s really James Franco who’s behind this. IF it is, it would appear the everyman is getting into the television biz, or more specifically, the web series biz (though surely this is art ). Anyway, we have little information about this project, but Franco Tweeted a link to it yesterday, saying, “my new show,” which is called Undergrads . [ more › ]
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James Franco Creates Web Series Starring Drunk College Kids
Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen’s 22,000-square-foot mansion in Los Angeles is finally finished and ready for move-in after the couple plunked down $20M on the project. Meanwhile, the Superbowl-bound quarterback’s Boston penthouse is still languishing on the market. [Daily Mail; Curbed Boston; previously ]
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Completions: Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen’s 22,000-square-foot…
Today, the King Center unveiled the King Center Imaging Project , which offers thousands of documents from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other figures from the civil rights movement. According to the site, “There are nearly a million documents associated with the life of Martin Luther King Jr. These pages will present a more dynamic view than is often seen of Dr. King’s life and times. The documents reveal the scholar, the father, and the pastor. Through these papers we see the United States of America at one of its most vulnerable, most honest and perhaps most human moments in history.” [ more › ]
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Thousands Of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Documents Now Online
The battle over Frank Gehry’s proposed Eisenhower Memorial rages on: the National Civic Art Society has published letters from the Eisenhower family to the National Capital Planning Commission asking that the project be halted. In keeping with the opinion held by the NCAS, the letter states that Gehry, uh, “missed the message here.” [NCAS]
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Prolific modernist-leaning architecture firms aren’t the only ones fashioning fancy residences out of corrugated-steel shipping containers: the latest Fair Companies videos depicts a California woman who created one for herself. Wanting to live cheaply, she took a shipping container that had previously been used to cart goods to and from China and turned it into a multifunctional 160-square-foot space, complete with a kitchen, living room, sleeping area, and even a play room for her daughter. “Basically I moved in there with like $4,000, I mean basically it was like the two-by-fours, insulation, the dry wall, the little bit of plumbing that I did on it, like the sink,” she says. “And I was in that house after a month. This is it. There’s not much more.” Amazingly, the only construction experience she had going into the project was remodeling a boat. And then she jokes: “I think I’m slightly claustrophobic.” Watch the full video below. The Video: · Corrugated Steel Shipping Containers Do Double Duty as Housing [Curbed National] · California shipping container tiny home & cargo trailer room [Fair Companies via The Jane Dough ]
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Video Interlude: Tour One Woman’s Tiny Self-Made Shipping Container Home
The idea of “hacking” Ikea —basically, making the stuff sold there look like other, possibly better, stuff—has evolved beyond the blog Ikea Hackers and into an actual in-store exhibition. Artist Taeyoon Choi plopped himself down in the Malmö, Sweden, branch—the largest in Europe—and basically enacted a bunch of strange actions on things he found. He made cinnamon buns from the cafeteria spin around. He assembled LACK side tables into a towering sculpture. He turned a kitchen vignette into his personal lab, complete with tools and gears and things that move. The point, according to The Creators Project, was to “create six minimalist sound sculptures which interact with the shoppers and surroundings.” Says Choi: “These six sets of improvisational performance, or ‘the action,’ does nothing much to change the soundscape of the shop or challenge the Capitalist system or to have any means of direct action toward the Machine. However, it is the uselessness and its evident impossibility that grants power as an artistic resistance.” All righty then. Please watch the video below. The Video: Hacking IKEA Trailer #2 from Taeyoon Choi on Vimeo . · Artist “Hacks” the Largest Ikea Store in Europe [Creators Project via Gizmodo ]
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Video Interlude: Watch a Guy Do a Bunch of Weird Stuff in a European Ikea
Photo: Architizer An interview with Dutch starchitect Rem Koolhaas was published recently in the German daily Der Spiegel. In the interview, held in the paper’s brand-new Hamburg headquarters, Koolhaas rails against “assembly-line cities and assembly-line buildings, standardizing buildings and cities,” seeming to implicate the recent redevelopment of the Hamburg waterfront (above) as one such boring standard. The only trouble is Koolhaas is hardly an objective observer of this particular project, as his HafenCity Science Center went unbuilt due to budget constraints while designs by Herzog & de Meuron and Richard Meier went ahead as planned. So was this all fueled by some professional jealousy? This is a conflict the architect tries to explain away by saying, “the city official in charge of the project has already been replaced twice.” Yeah, yeah, okay Rem, whatever you say. · Interview with Star Architect Rem Koolhaas [Der Spiegel] · Koolhaas in Der Spiegel [Architizer]
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Globe Trotting: Starchitect Rem Koolhaus Whines After His Design is Cancelled
Click here to view the full photogallery. Designed by Bangkok-based AD100 honoree Bill Bensley, this sprawling set of pavilions in Northern Thailand lies an hour’s flight from the capital and 30 minutes drive from Chiang Mai, the regional capital. The remote location hasn’t prevented the owners, an American couple, from seeking a hefty sum for their faraway vacation home: $15M. Perhaps aiding that price tag is the nearby Four Seasons resort and a gushing write up in the April 2007 issue of Architectural Digest. The four-acre compound, known as Villa Mae Rim, consists of seven pavilions crafted from rare and incredibly hardy golden teak and the project took an astounding eight years to complete. · Villa Mae Rim [official site] · A Thailand Treasure [Architectural Digest]
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Globe Trotting: A $15M Megamansion in Thailand’s Remote Northern Reaches
More and more Americans are logging onto the Internet simply to pass the time, without any agenda other than to enjoy diverting videos or peruse fun listicles or read spectacularly obvious articles about their web browsing habits. According to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project , 58 percent of all adults said that they use the Internet to “kill time or have fun at least occasionally.” And 75% of all adults surf the web for no reason whatsoever! The other 25% are logging on to productively and efficiently look at pornography. [ more › ]
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Report: Majority Of Americans Wasting Time On The Internet