2007.03.13
...and speaking of random tangents
wild turkey sighting; 2007.03.13 12:45; Ury
driving around the block on the way to market...
"Look, there's a big bird walking across the road. Is that a turkey?"
The bird is walking very slow. Is it wounded? We slowly drive by a few feet away.
"I think it's very old."
"It's probably just going back into the woods."
Within the various biographies of John James Audubon you'll find ongoing discrepancies regarding his whereabouts during his first several months in the United States. The discrepancies stem mostly from the biographers not knowing where Ury actually was.
For the record, Audubon arrived from France at New York City sometime August 1803. The first thing he did was go to a bank in Greenwich [Village] where Audubon's father had money waiting for his son. Within a day or two Audubon became very ill. The ship's captain had Audubon taken care of by two Quaker women at Morristown, New Jersey (25 miles west of New York City). Miers Fisher, the agent of Audubon's father, went to collect the young Audubon once he was well again and brought him back to Ury. Audubon stayed at Ury perhaps as much as a few months, but then insisted he be taken to Mill Grove, his father's farm not far from Norristown, Pennsylvania.
And from there on Audubon's life is like one seemingly random tangent after another.
Back to France, back to Mill Grove, Pittsburgh, PA, raft down the Ohio River, Louisville, KY, Henderson, KY, then somewhere along the Mississippi where the Ohio River enters, then down to New Orleans, then north on the Mississippi again, then back to New Orleans, then back to Philadelphia, then back to New York, then Liverpool, England, then Manchester, then London...(this is where I stopped reading one of the biographies, and I may have messed up a little on the sequence of places). And this was just the first 15 years or so since Audubon first came to the US.
I hope that wild turkey made it safely back into the woods. Are wild turkeys among the Birds of America?
2004.03.13
Re: to serve a larger purpose
I wonder when there is going to be an Apostate Architecture symposium.
Let's have a vote:
Do you prefer Republican Architecture or Democrat Architecture or Independent Architecture?
Is it true that someone somewhere is working a book entitled The Architecture of Taxation?
Chapter One: Money Bags
Chapter Two: Hand to Mouth
Chapter Three: The Art of Evasion
Chapter Four: Deductible Dependents
Chapter Five: Attachments
Chapter Six: Chapter Eleven
Chapter Seven: Schloss Schatzkammer 4 sale
2002.03.13
Re: Managing Email Lists
...the nature of design itself is always a play with and/or against limits. There are always limits, even within the most free environments, but limits are pushable and stretchable, just like they can resist or snap back when pushed very hard, and sometimes stretched limits can snap back so hard that they actually propel.
"All reality is relative to the vastness of its container."
1999.03.13
21st century buildings
I was just thinking tonight how I seem to have the ability to think about what the next big "style" will be well before it actually happens, and along those lines I thought one easy way to figure out what's going to be next is to look at the late work Le Corbusier and then take it a step further. I immediately thought of the Olivetti project and these wild curvy, wiggly office towers, and even then crashing them together. Moreover, the way that Olivetti is on a raised "terrain", I thought of easily creating a "terrain" out of pieces of the Media base model, and then having that raised on pilotis. The imaginative designs on this theme alone are boundless.
I next thought how Quondam could (should?) in 2000(+) exclusively present 21st century buildings, i.e., buildings designed within the first days, weeks, months, year of the 21st century -- of course, these buildings will be entirely my design--"History is largely controlled by those who write it."
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