“The concept behind the Lab — a cadre of designers embedded in the mayor’s office, with the power to revive public spaces around the city and launch a broad campaign of civic engagement — was unique in North America, and almost unimaginable in conservative San Diego. It seemed to answer the long-held desire of architects, especially, for designers to play a role in the decision-making that shapes cities.”
Tag: 02.23.15
Toronto’s Massey Hall Begins $135M Renovation
“For all its past glories, the hall has a shopworn feel, with those odd reclining seats and scuffed brass railings. The goal of the expensive facelift, paid for largely by corporate and government cash, is to do some sprucing up without sanding away the antique beauty of the place.”
The Designer Who Became Apple’s Biggest Asset
Jonathan Ive “establish[ed] the build and the finish of the iMac, the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. He is now one of the two most powerful people in the world’s most valuable company” – on whom 100,000 employees and a not-insignificant chunk of the stock market depend. Says Steve jobs’s widow, “Jony’s an artist with an artist’s temperament, and he’d be the first to tell you artists aren’t supposed to be responsible for this kind of thing.”
India’s Famous Cave Temples That Sat Unknown For More Than 1,000 Years
“The Ajanta Caves, 30 spellbinding Buddhist prayer halls and monasteries carved, as if by sorcery, into a horseshoe-shaped rock face in a mountainous region of India’s Maharashtra state, … were ‘discovered’ by accident in 1819 … [after being] abandoned by those who created it as long ago as AD 500.”
These Artists Promote Cultural Understanding (But Not If They Can’t Get Visas)
“In a time when cultural understanding is more critical than ever before, it’s become an uphill battle for artists from Islamic countries to obtain permission to travel to the United States.”
Theatre Cancels All-Asian “Showboat” After Concluding It Couldn’t Be Done
“We spoke with, and listened purposefully to members of racially diverse communities and particularly with our most direct constituents, Asian-Americans, regarding how tackling this work might be perceived when the Asian presence is thrust into the center of a conversation that has historically excluded it. After carefully absorbing arguments of both support and opposition, we have chosen to cancel the production, concluding that the goal that propelled us — to lift up the Asian-American theater artist — could not be sufficiently achieved.”
Con Men Try To Sell Fake Goya, Get Paid In Counterfeit Money, Then Get The Book Thrown At Them
“The con artists realized they had been tricked when they tried to deposit 1.7 million Swiss francs (€1.5 million) in a Geneva bank and were told that the banknotes were mere photocopies.”
Yes, Sometimes You Do Have To Censor Shakespeare, Says Mark Rylance
“I don’t think there’s pressure [to remove] the bawdy jokes. He’s bawdier a lot more times than people realise. The pressures I feel are more for times where he will say something very antisemitic.”
ISIS Burns 8,000 Rare Books and Manuscripts in Mosul’s Library
“Among its lost collections were manuscripts from the eighteenth century, Syriac books printed in Iraq’s first printing house in the nineteenth century, books from the Ottoman era, Iraqi newspapers from the early twentieth century and some old antiques like an astrolabe and sand glass used by ancient Arabs. The library had hosted the personal libraries of more than 100 notable families from Mosul over the last century.”
How A Museum Can Help Make Science Accessible
Ellen V. Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York: “The public has a real thirst to understand the world around them. But what people don’t want to do is be intimidated or made to feel like it’s too much for them to understand. We are … removing any sense that it’s too hard, remote, for experts only. It isn’t. Science really is a great detective story.”