“To answer this burning question, we turned to Raj Patel of the design and engineering consulting firm Arup Group and Kate Wagner of the viral architecture blog McMansion Hell. She’s also studying acoustics at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, synthesizing her interests in music and architecture. What did we learn?”
Tag: 08.15.17
How Millennials Use Public Radio: Study
The respondents value public radio, but, except for Morning Edition, they listen to very little of it in real time. (They prefer on-demand.) And they do have some frustrations.
The Beet Goes On: Vegetable Orchestra Takes Root On New York’s Long Island
Inspired by the venerable Viennese Vegetable Orchestra, Dale Stuckenbruck created the Long Island Vegetable Orchestra. They make snake gourds into saxophones, butternut squash into horns, broccoli into flutes, and long orange root vegetables into, yes, “carronets.” “Over the years, [the LIVO] has performed at schools, galleries, libraries and at an environmental conference in Geneva. It even appeared in a film.” (includes video)
Juha, For 1,200 Years The Hero Of The Arab World’s Favorite Jokes
“[The] wise old fool, [with] his long-suffering donkey … has been a part of local culture for centuries – and has proved useful to Arab jokers and satirists right up until the modern day.”
Architect Gunnar Birkerts, 92
“Birkerts was best known for light-filled modernist buildings that reflected the Scandinavian architectural tradition that influenced him. Many” – among them, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Corning Museum of Glass, the south wing of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, and the Latvian National Library – “were essays in bold curves or angular, irregular shapes.”
At ‘Pompeii Of The Middle East’, 1,200-Year-Old Mosaic Workshop Unearthed
“The ancient house was likely undergoing a remodel when, on Jan. 18, 749, the massive earthquake struck Jerash, located in what is now Jordan … Before the earthquake, artisans were putting together mosaics for the floors of the house, but they abandoned their artwork after the natural disaster struck. This abandonment turned the house into a time capsule, allowing modern-day archaeologists a chance to see how artisans from the Umayyad – the early Islamic period – assembled these decorative mosaics.”
Robots As Art – What You See Helps Shape How You Engage With Them
“Today’s AI inhabits the realm of minimalist or abstract art, with Amazon Echo as a sort of Brancusian monolith. There’s even a new robot you can have sex with, meant not just as an object of lust-satisfaction, but also a companion. It’s the ancient story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who falls in love with his work, Galatea, only for it to come to life. AI is art: man-made approximations of nature, whatever the look of their skin.”
Documents Show Architects Herzog & de Meuron Reduced Their Fee For Tate Modern Extension
Minutes from a Tate board of trustees meeting held in July 2015 show that Herzog & de Meuron was asked not to take its full percentage fee for extra work on the 10-storey project as the brick-clad scheme ballooned in costs from £215 million in 2012 to £260 million on completion in 2016.
The True Crime Genre Has Gone Upscale And Literary. Is It An Improvement?
“Not for them the tabloid gusto of the genre’s doyenne, Ann Rule (“The stalking, predatory animal cuts the weakest from the pack, and then kills at his leisure,” The Stranger Beside Me).They’re more likely to follow the lead of one of the first post-Serial memoirists to wrap a crime story in her own enveloping subjectivity, Amy Butcher, author of 2015’s Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder.”
Is Scotland Yard Going To Close Its Famous Art Crime Unit?
Scotland Yard looks set to close its Art and Antiques Unit, according to a former head. Its three detectives have been reassigned to help the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire, in west London, which killed more than 80 people on 14 June.