A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

compartmentalized by twoeightnine To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Blue by archidose Blue condominiums now under construction, designed by Bernard Tschumi. From a recent trip to New York. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Coudal Partners links to a gallery by photographer David Plowden, A Handful of Dust , from a recent book of the same name . Abandoned Car Barn, Punxsutawney, PA, 2004 I recall seeing some of Plowden's photographs at the Chicago Cultural Center years ago...the Small Towns series, perhaps. The stark yet carefully composed black and white shots of rural America capture a way of life that's not yet ready to be superseded by something else. These latest photos in the Dust series, though, point towards an abandonment of those places for the cities and suburbs, places that have supplanted the rural as the most feasible place to live. It's a sad state that Plowden captures remarkably well, somewhere between a nostalgic and a reporter's eye. Wellman, IA, 2004 Perhaps these places lay in wait for its occupants to return. Or maybe for nature to reclaim the sites as her own.

I'm taking the opportunity before school starts in a few weeks to get some tweaking of this site taken care of. Unfortunately, it has distracted me from posting anything of substance, though I hope to return to that shortly. As of right now, here are the changes, some regular readers may have already noticed, others not so obvious: :: Hide and seek comments, meaning they can now be seen on the main page. Default is hidden, so click the #comments link next to the envelope (and show/hide--> helper) at the bottom of each post to see them. :: Posting comments now happens in a pop up window, meaning you can see the images and rest of the post below when making comments, helpful in my opinion. FYI: You must show the comments in order to post one. :: Archives in sidebar are now in a drop-down menu, so they take up less space. :: Credits and personal stuff is now located at the footer. Scroll down to see. :: Titles on the sidebar are now dark gray, as the old orange was hard to read. So...

After returning from the successful NYC apartment hunt , my Bloglines inbox was overflowing with five days worth of unread posts and links and such. Here's some of the ones I clipped for later reading/viewing that might be of interest to you, dear readers: :: Shibam: Saving the Manhattan of the Desert (via Earth Architecture ) :: Urban Design Review , Summer 2006 (via many places) :: The NAFTA Superhighway :: Why Sylvia Sucks :: Six Weeks 'Til Sky Mirror :: NYC Blames Bloomberg for Failure to Deal With Traffic :: Brutal Urbanism :: Gehry's Plan for Brooklyn And some things worth sharing that landed in my mailbox: :: A touch of superstar architecture in Budapest (thanks, mj) :: Dwell on Design :: Man Builds Home from "Big Dig" Scraps (thanks, John M.) :: Project Frog modular classrooms (Thanks, Alex) :: The Architecture Expression

at night by vigggo Seattle Public Library by OMA. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

That's the way you spell success * I'm glad to report that my wife and I were successful in finding and getting an apartment for our move to New York at the end of the month. After looking both with and without brokers (more in a bit) in Manhattan, we made our way to Queens and found a beauty of an apartment in the Astoria neighborhood. Here's a street in the area: For those unfamiliar with the process of apartment hunting in New York City, it's not the easiest thing to do on a five-day trip. Because of rental laws, just about everything is in favor of the tenant as opposed to the landlord, so the latter make it very difficult to rent, in order to protect their interests. The first, and biggest, impediment is brokers. Most landlords use brokers to find tenants, and those brokers charge fees, usually one to two months rent. Given that brokers can only show apartments in buildings they're hired for, it's recommended to look with more than one broker to open up the...