Life Sans Bldgs

At Comics: Philosophy and Practice this weekend in Chicago, Chris Ware revealed more details about his highly-anticipated latest project, Building Stories, coming from Pantheon this October. As attendee Kathleen Dunley put it, Building Stories is “many little books in a beautiful box.”

Stay tuned, we can’t wait to share more of this exciting new graphic novel with you.

“Chris Ware’s BUILDING STORIES is the rarest kind of brilliance; it is simultaneously heartbreaking, hilarious, shockingly intimate and deeply insightful. There isn’t a graphic artist alive or dead who has used the form this wonderfully to convey the passage of time, loneliness, longing, frustration or bliss. It is the reader’s choice where and how to begin this monumental work — the only regret you will have in starting it is knowing that it will end.”

- J.J. Abrams

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Fictional cartography: Gotham City. (via Gotham City Map Archive)

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I put together this quick side-by-side of the Avengers’ New York City, with Stark Tower in place of the MetLife Building. The concept behind Stark Tower is fascinating. I love the amount of thought they put into creating this apocryphal skyline:

Tony Stark bought the iconic MetLife Building (formerly the PanAm Building) and ripped off the top adding his own piece of parasitic architecture to the top. The height of arrogance, and the essence of Stark! As a production designer, this was the most fun set by far for me having grown up in New York and looking at that building everyday for my whole life, to be able to effect it’s history, forever, was an amazing opportunity. In choosing the MetLife location we were also recognizing the rich topography of the streets below which is a unique arrangement in New York, with the viaduct over 42nd St and the tunnels behind Grand Central Station, not to mention Grand Central itself, the ultimate conflagration of rich histories and futuristic ideas.

[via Designing The Avengers: The Art of Marvel’s Most Ambitious Movie]

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Duck Hunt.

On April 30, I’ll be speaking about the architecture of prison breaks and bank heists on a panel with 2 FBI agents. (via Breaking Out and Breaking In Final Event)

The architecture of deduction. Sherlock Holmes’s flat at 221B Baker Street, assembled from every mention of it in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories.

[via 221b Baker Street]

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backatown:

Superdome construction photos, 1971–1975. Origin unknown, found via this site.

TWO MEN ENTER. ONE MAN LEAVES.

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Learning from the United Federation of Planets (via NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: THE “STAR TREK” ATTRACTION THAT ALMOST CAME TO LIFE in 1992. – GGE Blog)

acidadebranca:

Black & White Architectural Photo

[25]

Brasilia | La construction de Brasilia par Marcel Gautherot

source

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Symbolic images in dark, amorphous space.

“Any sense of enclosure or direction comes from lighted signs rather than forms reflected in light. The source of light in the Strip is direct; the signs themselves are the source. They do not reflect light from external, sometimes hidden, sources as is the case with most billboards and Modern architecture. The mechanical movement of neon lights is quicker than mosaic glitter… and the intensity of light on the Strip as well as the tempo of its movement is greater to accommodate the greater spaces, greater speeds, and greater impacts that our technology permits and our sensibilities respond to.”

- Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, “The Las Vegas Strip,” Learning From Las Vegas, revised edition (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977): 116

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Rear Window Timelapse via things magazine.

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thingsmagazine:

Rear Window in London, a model by Marialuisa Pacini (via things mag)

I’ve been wanting to build something like this with the buildings of The Sting. A topography of the long-con that includes the fake OTB parlor, its accomplice buildings, and the network of actions/events that connect them.

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I normally don’t succumb to memes but this is just too perfect.

Every cafe in a collapse romantic

God, I remember the feeling so well. It was like revolution was brewing with the organic, imported, fair-trade espresso beans. But five years later, the owners have blocked all the power outlets in the place and now its wireless network is called “Please buy coffee.” All the tables are still full though; all day every day. But now so is every other cafe in the city. Yesterday’s customers made the internet and today’s just get lost in it. There’s no work getting done - people just don’t have anywhere else to go. But at least laptop batteries last longer.

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For many visitors to the Academia that day, more attractive than the celebrated work of art was the small console that stands just yards away. It looked like a pub golf game but was, in fact, David 2.0. Created by Stanford labs, the digital David is a “perfect” 3D model that art-users can rotate and manipulate to examine the sculpture in much closer detail than the would be possible with the original. From six tons to thirty-two gigabytes, the digitized replica of a masterpiece can now be reconstituted in the studio of anyone with a high-speed internet connection and enough hard drive space. Fine art on demand. And since the digital Davids are perfect replicas of David as he existed during the original scan, all physical traces of history present on the surface of the original will be present in future reproductions. Can a reproduction at this level of detail include the aura of the work along with the nicks, scratches, and imperfections? I doubt it. But the flexibility afforded by the digital model creates the possibility for entirely new experiences. Like seeing a 30-foot-tall David in a Manhattan traffic jam. A reproduction that is further reproduced as we retweet camera phone photos of a that David-double lying on a lowboy truck as its transported through New York City.

Full post on Life Without Buildings

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