When architect Louis Sullivan began cultivating Chicago’s vertical growth with some of the world’s first skyscrapers, he famously cloaked his steel high-rises with images of vegetation. Embellishing the tops of his multistory buildings with iron-cast flora, Sullivan sought to evoke the image of a novel breed of architecture sprouting upwards from the fertile American soil. He quickly recognized how the skyscraper would change the experience of the city, how a soaring building would be read from street level, and how Americans could gaze upwards and project their nation’s values of collective advancement onto the towering facades of his “form follows function” designs.
A few weeks ago, we got a close-up look at the fallout from America’s ongoing financial crisis in Douglas R. Smith’s photos, taken inside the foreclosed homes of California’s Central Valley. But poverty and joblessness are nothing new for Rust Belt cities like Detroit, whose population declined by 25 percent between 2000 and 2010. Although other photographers have explored the rubble of its public spaces, Kevin Bauman has been working since the ’90s to document Detroit’s abandoned homes. “I had always found it to be amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence,” he writes. Bauman’s 100 Abandoned Houses project captures both the extent and the variety of Detroit’s depression, in which homes ranging from secluded hovels to lavish, brick and stone mansions sit empty. Click through to see some of the most striking images from the series.
This week, theParis Review let us in on a little secret — an illegal, speakeasy-style bookstore right here in our fair city of New York. While we try to hunt down the exact coordinates in hopes of a good read (and a good story), we thought we’d tally a few of our favorite unconventional and unusual bookstores from around the world, whether they be aquatic, underground, holy or just plain strange looking. After all, even us indie-bookshop devotees could use a little extra weirdness in our lives, and in our novels. Click through to see our picks, and let us know if we’ve left your favorite unconventional bookstore off the list!
1. In response to Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes has decided to compile his own swimsuit publication. We don’t know about you, but we think that Picasso looks kind of airbrushed… [via Kottke]
2. For some reason Rush Limbaugh spent part of yesterday’s show implying that Michelle Obama is fat — or at least eats to much fatty food: “The problem is — and dare I say this — it doesn’t look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary, dietary advice. And then we hear that she’s out eating ribs at 1,500 calories a serving with 141 grams of fat per serving, yeah it does — what do you mean, what do I mean?” [via Gawker]
3. Is Radiohead planning to release a companion album to The King of Limbs in the not-so-distant future? More importantly, how many of us would really care at this point? [via NME]
4. Last week, Detroit’s RoboCop statue reached its goal of $50,000 in fully crowd-sourced funding thanks to Kickstarter. Now io9 gives you a first look at what it could look like.
5. Paramount has decided to release a 40-minute longer Director’s Fan Cut of Justin Bieber: Never Say Never for an exclusive one-week run beginning this Friday, February 25, only in 3D. Slashfilm explains why even non-fans should care.
Editor’s note: Each Friday, our internet-savvy friends over at BuzzFeed curate a post for us that’s filled with links to some of the most talked-about items on the web that week. Enjoy!
* After beating Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber for Album of the Year at the Grammys, Arcade Fire was met with a resounding “Who?”
* When Esperanza Spalding won the Grammy for Best New Artist, Beliebers collectively lost their minds on Twitter.
* It sounded like Justin Bieber implied that rape is all a part of God’s plan when his words were twisted in a recent interview with Rolling Stone.
We’ve previously explored the ruins of Detroit in this space, and while we found the devastation captured in Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s photographs fascinating, the images also made us feel like we were rubbernecking at disaster porn. On the other side of the spectrum is “Views of Detroit,” a 22-minute clip from a group of Danish planning students which was shot as part of a research experiment on how to use film as a method of urban development. “The film uses a strongly subjective narrative, with no aim to point out answers to the challenges Detroit is currently facing, they explain. “However we hope our methodology can inspire planners to include new perspectives from everyday life in their work: creating future cities.” Click through to check out the fascinating portion on Michigan Central Station.
1. Kenneth Mars, a character actor best known for his roles in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein and The Producers (but who will always be remembered by us as the regal voice of Grandpa Longneck from The Land Before Time), died Saturday at the age of 75. [via THR]
2. Glenn Beck believes that Muse was trying to start a revolution with their performance at The Grammys because of where they’re from: “You have to remember these are Europeans…they have had very few glimpses of real freedom. Even when England won the Second World War, they didn’t go into freedom. That’s where the Road to Serfdom came from.” [via Gawker]
3. If the idea of getting married at a McDonald’s sounds appealing to you, then you might need to plan a destination wedding to Hong Kong, where a “McWedding” service launched at select locations back in January. The typical package — which costs $1282 — includes gifts, invitation cards, decor featuring Ronald McDonald and The Hamburglar, and lots and lots of fast food. [via Gothamist]
4. After the city of Detroit refused to provide funding for a 7-foot tall iron statue of Robocop to go up near Michigan Central Station, a Kickstarter project is already over a third of the way toward its $50,000 goal. [via Boing Boing]
5. “I’m 41. I think it gets embarrassing… There’s a lot of things I wanna do. I like making coffee.” – LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy explained why he’s quitting the band on last night’s Colbert Report
It has been a while since we’ve indulged in our obsession with photography of abandoned places, but thanks to The Ruins of Detroit, a book by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, we’ve given in. “It seems like Detroit has just been left to die,” Marchand recently explained to The Guardian. “Many times we would enter huge art deco buildings with once-beautiful chandeliers, ornate columns and extraordinary frescoes, and everything was crumbling and covered in dust, and the sense that you had entered a lost world was almost overwhelming. In a very real way, Detroit is a lost world — or at least a lost city where the magnificence of its past is everywhere evident.” Click through to preview some of our favorite photographs featured in the book.
Mike Holtzman and Sabrina Fitzwilliams, who run the website Barebones Detroit, were the first to spot an alleged Banksy mural of a yellow bird in a cage before it was mysteriously removed from Detroits’ Packard Plant and ended up on eBay. Though the auction page says it’s authentic, we think “authentic” is a better description, as the claim has yet to be confirmed, and Banksy’s frequently copied work is notoriously difficult to verify. That said, we’ve put together a few steps we suggest you follow should you spot what you think might be the work of Bristol’s son.
Global-based web project CitID is enlisting the help of artists to give cities worldwide a typeface makeover. As they explain on their website, “Our hope is that creatives from around the globe will make a logo or a visual interpretation of the city closest to their heart.” We rounded up a few of our favorite designs from larger cities around the country to see if the fonts matched the local scenes; let us know what you think in the comments.
