The past present and future of architecture’s cyber space..Thanksgiving Day 2014

The past present and future of architecture’s cyber space..Thanksgiving Day 2014.

“What did Bach say to his fellow players in their daily poker game.”I’m going Baroque”.

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“Certainly no doubt about it,” Americans have a lot to be grateful for. A revolutionary passion r for some two hundred and fifty years. A Utopia?  A Republic worth hanging out in”regardless of falling short of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation .

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Remembering an iconoclast named Frank Lloyd Wright, he was acknowledged as a pioneer architect post Word War 2 in dream making. He grafted his iconoclastic ideas into Nature , the “theHigh Noon” a tombstone turf, the Painted Desert FlagstaffArizona landmarks savored his urban state of mind..

His thinking was so far out of the box, that a visiting Brooklyn College Historian gave a lecture about his larger than lifeblueprint, rebutting conventional wisdom..playing it safe,transcending his own  birthright.

Whether or not he was ahead of his time , he set an example.. But like A. Quincy Jones,(Ucla’s Research Library), RichardNeutra (Robinson Hall) he was ahead of his  conventional “play it safe” mode.

That orientation to the state of mind of the West. Monument Valley appealed to John Ford, Duke Wayne’s “Angel”, riding “shogun” with Claire Trevor, Thomas Mitchell, Porter Hall intheir  roles as passengers in  “Stagecoach”. 

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Frank Lloyd Wright gripped our imagination inasmuchstereotypes denied the original road (“The wizard of Oz”) ton post World War2 life.

But it wasn’t a nonconformist 17 year old Freshman from Brooklyn attending a  global University that needed that shot in the arm.

Didn’t Stalin’s daughter fall in love with Frank Lloyd Wright’s  younger partner, and interestingly enough Morris Ernst who wrote the fireside chats for FDR, aided and abetted her umbilicalchord, from hi s legal dome on the Big Apple’s Madison Avenue. Or his apartment at two Fifth Avenue, Greenwich Village. 

She fled from her father’s tyranny unlike composerShostakovich, those Siberian dead end  camps, liberating Architecture of a crusader like Frank Lloyd Wright and his younger partner..

That human beings are naturals on the planet and therefore whether they  sell out their marketplace visions, they are an extension of their cosmos.

Robison Hall, Ophir Drive and Land fair, in Ucla’s WestwoodVillage hills, overlooking the campus and Ed Pauley-coach JohnWooden’s  universe, Frank Lloyd Wright found himself afriendly congenial base in Southern California. ….

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Which brings to mind, the passing of another original. Ourcousin Harold’s widow Judy 
Edelman whose leadership an passion, transcended the BigApple  and the conventional Greenwich Village state of mind,during the first week of October 2014.

Born in Brooklyn of immigrant parents, she was a graduate of Connecticut College, N.Y.U. and Columbia School of Architecture when females went into design, rather than invade a man bastion and stronghold.

But unlike Cleopatra, she identified with her public servant role, bonding with Harold, into their Edelman and Edelmanpartnership:,  living out their dream ,grafting their visions and Frank Lloyd Wright into their determinism..

To think of their destined fate, sharing their dreamed space on Bank Street and its down to earth Reality in the “Village”.

The City that never sleeps. November 27, 2014  An ode to the gift of Thanksgiving.

The treadmill to oblivion

“The treadmill to oblivion” Fred Allen’s 17 year Sunday night of comedic Allen Alley’s tableau: Mike Nichols was just an immigrant lad from Nazi Germany, growing up on Chicago’s Southside, capturing the absurdity of adolescence, his parodies with Elaine May, later directing Dustin Hoffman in the “Graduate” for an Oscar.

Emmys, Tonys, you name it….

“Plastics anyone?”

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In the meantime over in Cambridge, England,  Darwrin’s landscape; the other genius throwing up the apple,  Isaac Newton breaking through, evolving into Sir Isaac…..

England’s DNA lab, Crick and Watson bent on the Nobel Prize for getting to the “Photograph 51” of the American Rosalind Franklin for her contribution to their manifesto.

The two helix strands overlapping one another. Their sheer determination and her photograph 51 got to the bottom of DNA.And the camera, notwithstanding its humidity, belonged to  Rosalind’s father.

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Whether Steve Jobs, the pioneer discoverer of  Apple, from his garage in  Northern California, wrestled with his programming all the possibilities of his tick tack toe tactics.

Across, down the line, diagonal,

Hacking out all the possibilities over two days and nights. Thus the other Steve named Wozniak visualized the birth of Apple.

The moral of these strands of permutations rising from Allen’s Alley to the Cambridge England lab to Job’s blitz is still a work in progress.

“Plastics anyone?”

November 21, 2014 The City that never sleeps.

In the “Unanswered question” Charles Ives….

In the “Unanswered question”  Charles Ives…. The insurancerenaissance composer asked “how do we justify our existence on this minor planet?”  

George Gershwin of Tin Pan Alley asked that question in “Porgy and Bess”, Porgy visiting  Catfish Row. Lenny Bernstein ‘s “West Side Story”  answers. Dore Schary  “The Red Badge of Courage” responds.

With all the sound and fury, sorting out the permutations of a consumer society, the riveting account of channel 7 news breaking the constancy of mediocrity by  their breathtakingawareness of N Y Fire Department “heroes escalating a 68s floor rescue of two “workers” trap at One World Trade Center, when one of their two ropes of their scaffold broke.

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Hanging by their thumbs sort of speaking, the Fire Department  justified their heroic roles, their permutations seemed to transcend their presence, post ambush of 3000 human beings on the hijacking of three jets into the twin towers  on 9/11/01.

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Surrounded by the trivia and the trite, only the NASA , with its twin Mir(the Russian variation) serving  the   cyber spacetechnology… a rescue 68 floors above West Street sidewalks, spectators watching, their concentration unbroken by these fire department heroics….cutting through the thick glass windows, lowering another scaffold …

.”The Red Badge of Courage”

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For over 90 minutes the channel 7 reporters spell bounded by the NYFD were the NASA daredevils of eternal memory (Frank Dwyer, a former cop) who sacrificed their selflessness forCharles Ives’s “the unanswered question” 

“The Red Badge of Courage” playing out?                                                            I                                                                                    

“The unanswered question”

Indeed!

The City that never sleeps, November 12, 2014