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L’abside de l’église de Combray, peut-on vraiment en parler? Elle était si grossière, si dénuée de beauté artistique et même d’élan religieux. Du dehors, comme le croisement des rues sur lequel elle donnait était en contre-bas, sa grossière muraille s’exhaussait d’un soubassement en moellons nullement polis, hérissés de cailloux, et qui n’avait rien de particulièrement ecclésiastique, les verrières semblaient percées à une hauteur excessive, et le tout avait plus l’air d’un mur de prison que d’église. Et certes, plus tard, quand je me rappelais toutes les glorieuses absides que j’ai vues, il ne me serait jamais venu à la pensée de rapprocher d’elles l’abside de Combray. Seulement, un jour, au détour d’une petite rue provinciale, j’aperçus, en face du croisement de trois ruelles, une muraille fruste et surélevée, avec des verrières percées en haut et offrant le même aspect asymétrique que l’abside de Combray. Alors je ne me suis pas demandé comme à Chartres ou à Reims avec quelle puissance y était exprimé le sentiment religieux, mais je me suis involontairement écrié: «L’Église!»

-Marcel Proust

“The apse of the Combray church; what can one say about it? It was so crude, so lacking in artistic beauty and even religious spirit. From outside, because the crossroads which it commanded was on a lower level, its crude wall rose up from a subbasement of quite unpolished ashlar, bristling with flints, and having nothing particularly ecclesiastical about it, the windows seemed to have been pierced at an excessive height, and the whole looked more like the wall of a prison than the wall of a church. And certainly, later, when I recalled all the glorious apses I had seen, it would never have occurred to me to compare them with the apse of Combray. But, one day, at the bend of a little street in a country town, I noticed, opposite the crossing of three lanes, a rough and unusually high wall with windows pierced far above and the same asymmetrical appearance as the apse of Combray. Then I did not ask myself as at Chartres or Rheims how powerfully it expressed religious feeling, but involuntarily exclaimed: “The church!””

- Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swan

The City We Imagined/The City We Made

The Architectural League presents
The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010

An exhibition about architecture, planning, and development in New York since 2001

On view at 250 Hudson Street (Entrance on Dominick Street) in Hudson Square
May 8–June 26, 2010
Exhibition hours: Wednesday-Sunday, Noon-7 pm
Free admission

 The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010 is the sixth in an ongoing series of Architectural League exhibitions about contemporary architecture in New York City.  This installment takes as its subject the design, planning, and building of New York in the first decade of the twenty-first century.  Beginning in 2001, an array of powerful forces converged to dramatically transform large portions of the city.  The events of September 11, the policies and priorities of the Bloomberg Administration, the volatile ups and downs of the global and local economies, advances in material and construction technologies, and a new interest among the public in leading edge architecture all combined to reshape New York in ways that we may not fully grasp for decades to come.
 

Review in New York Magazine

I was in the Photo Corps and have a few images in this show. I’m not sure it congealed successfully as an exhibition, but the process was a hell of a lot of fun.

Chaotic terrain between Kasei Valles and Sacra Fossae

Sacra Fossae is a fault system that extends for more than 1000 km. It is several hundred metres deep and separates Kasei Valles to the south and west from Lunae Planum. It was named after Isola Sacra, an island at the estuary of the river Tiber in Italy.

The images show an old 35 km-diameter impact crater in the north. The crater’s south-western rim is eroded strongly. The erosion is caused mostly by flowing water. The source of the water was located in Echus Chasma, which lies roughly 850 km to the southwest.

The crater floor and the northwestern part of the imaged region are remarkably flat and have been formed by sediments and basaltic lava flows originating from the Tharsis volcanic region.

What a gorgeous image. Wholly in tension between alien and familiar, naturalized erosive forms collide with impact craters. Mars is full of dust.

I’m sorry, make that a:

WHAT.

June 16, 2010 ‘Catios’ Bring Cats Outdoors By JENNIFER A. KINGSON

WHEN it comes to their homes, there are few things New Yorkers prize as much as a little outdoor space — a terrace, perhaps, or a small deck in the backyard.

Their cats feel the same way.

So some cat owners who would never dream of letting their pets roam free outside have come up with a creative compromise: an enclosed space — usually in the form of a screened-in porch or deck — that allows them to share the great outdoors.

Please don’t call it a cage. They prefer the term “catio.”

“The cats, they like to sit out there,” said Stefanie L. Russell, 44, referring to the balcony of her 12th-floor Greenwich Village apartment, where a homemade enclosure keeps her three Burmese cats safe. “Before, we basically didn’t use the balcony at all, because we were afraid that the cats would fall or jump.”

Two years ago, she and her husband, Robert Davidson, who are on the faculty of the N.Y.U. College of Dentistry, fenced off half the balcony, which runs the length of the apartment. They used industrial-grade PVC pipe and heavy black netting, creating a fully enclosed space that they decorated with furniture, plants and carpeting.

Now the couple and their 9-year-old daughter, Sophie, leave the terrace door open for Oliver, Lily and Jackson, who are, as Ms. Russell put it, “the type of cats that love to run out in the hallway.”

WHAT.

ithoughtyousaidgoforit:

nevver:

Olivetti

Speaking of William Kentridge… Luckily saw his show at MoMA before it closed. Constructivists!

Snuck Redux: Another Letter from Our Southern Editor:

I ♥ The Paris Review!

Shostakovich, dashing. Check out Kentridge’s “The Nose”

Ludwig van

“I became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but the shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and unappreciated.”

- Vladimir Nabokov via (via ithoughtyousaidgoforit, liquidnight)

Altesmuseum Berlin