Tuesday, May 05, 2009

TAKING A STROLL THROUGH LONDON: 1899


Actually some of the photos are more recent than that, but they're all pretty old. I thought you might be interested to see the city as it looked from the vantage point of a casual stroller, about a hundred years ago.

That's regent Street above. No poor folks there. Employees of the shops often lived in nearby hostels. Click to enlarge.



This (above) is Billingsgate, under the shadow of the monument to the victims of the Great Fire in 1666.



Above, The Round House in Chalk Farm, built in 1847.



In the 16th century this tavern (above) was frequented by river thieves and smugglers.



Above, Marylebone Station as it looked in the 1920s. Lack of funds meant the station had to be designed by a staff engineer, and he took a bolts and braces approach. It's still impressive.


Above, The Royal Courts of Justice. I spent a few hours here, being a tourist and looking in on a couple of cases. This is my favorite spot in London.  What a debt we all owe to English law!



Many, many, many thanks to Kellie for the interesting links, which included this Youtube video.




Sunday, May 03, 2009

NEW ASTRONOMICAL PHOTOS


Boy, it pays to check in on the Hubble and NASA sites every few weeks! I'm constantly amazed at what can be found there. Above a galaxy is being stripped of its spiral arm by another galaxy. The culprit isn't the big galaxy on the bottom, but one of the smaller galaxies higher up in the picture. 



Here's a photo of stars in our own Milky Way, from the region where stars are densely packed and fast moving.
 


Here's (above) a planet only 25 light years away. It moves in the debris field from some giant explosion.



Here (above) the expanding ring from a nova breaks up into smaller shapes, forming a kind of bracelet.



A happy face in a Martian crater!



Here (above) are opalescent storm clouds on Jupiter.  Click to enlarge.



This (above) is one of the latest and best of all Saturn photos. It's a garden of hurricanes as seen by the Cassini probe. My guess is that all the white dots, even the ones that ones that aren't obvious spirals,  are swirling storms.  Long jet streams of clouds flow through the hurricanes like rivers.  Be sure to click to enlarge. 



Here's (above) a liquid ocean of hydrocarbons on Titan. The picture was taken with radar, which pierced the dense clouds.
 


One of Saturn's many moons (above).



Above, another moon of Saturn. What made the craters look like that?












Four more moons of Saturn, taken by Cassini. Click to enlarge.



Saturday, May 02, 2009

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PREFAB HOUSES?


I love the idea of customizable prefab housing, the kind an old lady could build with a screwdriver. The idea is at least a hundred years old, but sad to say, it's an idea whose time still hasn't come.

When I researched this I was surprised to see that Thomas Edison tried to make prefab houses. His idea was to make them out of concrete and build them on the site using molds.



The caption under the picture above tells the story. He sold only eleven of the houses, which were not highly regarded by the people who lived in them.



He even made concrete furniture for the houses!  Above are some concrete phonographs.



Habitat-type prefab condos were attempted in the 60s but the people who lived in them had nothing but complaints, and they got a bad rep. Here's (above) an hexagonal variant. You ordered the hexagon at the factory showroom and a crane put it into place on a frame.



Remember the flying saucer prefabs? You can still buy them.  There were plans to make high rises out of them but I don't think they were ever built. 



The prefab ideal still persists, maybe because people are reminded of it by Legos.



Lego should go into the prefab business and design real houses that look and build just like the Lego toys. I'm serious! Well, maybe the grass should be real.



I like plastic when it doesn't pretend to be something else. Fill large-size Legos with styrofoam for insulation and build real structures with them!



La Corbusier's famous "wine rack" experiment was actually built. A frame was put up and prefab  housing units were slid into place like wine bottles in a wine rack. 



In theory people living in Corbusier's wine rack could change apartments every year, to take advantage of new architectural fashions. The old apartment is simply slid out by a crane, and the new one is inserted, like a file drawer.  I'd be surprised if anyone actually did this.



Where prefab actually took hold was in small backyard structures like tool sheds, gazebos and dog houses.



Some people do attempt to live in these tiny houses. The company that sells the one above advertises that dinners seating 4 or 5 people can be comfortably held there. Of course you probably have to sleep on the table afterward.



IKEA makes prefab houses for the European market, or at least they did when the founder of the store was still alive. That's one of them above. Not very good-looking in my opinion.



The houses are meant to be furnished with IKEA furniture. A consultation with an IKEA interior designer is included with the price of the house.



Maybe 20% of all new Japanese houses are prefab (above). Toyota makes a lot of them.



Here's (above) a Japanese styrofoam prefab. Styrofoam may be the building material of the future, provided a way can be found to prevent the house from blowing away.



Maybe a little old lady with a screwdriver actually could build one of these (above).



Laugh if you want to, but whole communities of styrofoam igloos exist in Japan.



Japanese prefabs come in all sizes and shapes. The one above works fine as a counterpoint to the older houses on the street, but a whole block of houses like that might be a bit much. 

If prefab makes a comeback then the post-modern look will probably get new life. One reason prefab was abandoned years ago was that complicated prefab shapes didn't ship very well. The new architectural aesthetic with its emphasis on simplistic, flat, walls probably ships very well.



That's all I have to say on the subject, but I couldn't help throwing in this off-topic picture of a Japanese home. The builder wanted his homes to look like they were miniature communities, even though they were occupied by single families. The rooms deliberately appear like little separate buildings surrounded by paths and courtyards. Actually they're all one structure. Nifty, huh?




Monday, April 27, 2009

MIKE'S MUSIC


Mike played this for Kali, John and I over the weekend. I'm ashamed to say that I never heard of Sam & Dave before I saw this. Boy, they sure put on a show! I read that these guys actually hated each other. 


The studio band behind Sam and Dave was Booker T. and the MGs. Here (above) they do their own number, "Green Onions." When I get rich I want this to play whenever I enter a room. Imagine everyone dropping what they're doing and making a path for you as you stroll in, cigarette in hand and Rayban Wayfarers (sunglasses) on nose, through the awed crowd with this music playing in the background.

Gee, I wish cartooning was like this. Wouldn't it be great if what we did with a pencil was just as entertaining, just as cool, and just as innovative and soulfull as what Sam & Dave and Booker T. did?



Saturday, April 25, 2009

ART OF THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDS


I love the art of the South Pacific Islands, which is also called "oceanic art."  There are striking similarities in the styles of islands spread thousands of miles apart, and it's hard to resist the idea that all these cultures had some common country of origin. I'd guess a combination of ancient India and aboriginal Australia, but what do I know?






This art is memorable because of it's complete "otherness." Europeans just don't think this way. The make-up and masks seem to threaten with weird, supernatural horror. 



But the difference is greater than that.  If you can judge by the sculpture, island people seem to have had more of a sense of humor than Europeans. A lot of them were of the opinion that their their neighbors were outrageously funny-looking, if not downright ugly, and they took every opportunity to lambast them with carved caricatures that they set up outside their huts. No wonder they were at war all the time. 



Gee, maybe some of them (above) were kind of...beauty deficient. 




I've seen lumpy heads like this one (above) plenty of times in the National Geographic. I guess that's what happens when you live around trillions of bugs.



There's a theory that primitive people who go around naked don't think of themselves as naked. As long as they have that little string around their waists they feel completely clothed. Woe to the uncouth villager who forgets to put his string on in the morning.



Some sculptures (above) appear to have been caricatures, pure and simple.




Others (above) seem to have had deep, mystical significance. 



Here (above) Balinese style seems to merge with an island sensibility. And look at the symmetry. It's odd how primitive man is often so wedded to symmetry



Nice mask (above)! A flat out caricature!



I didn't know that Sammy Davis Jr. (above) used to live in the tropics.









These masks from the 19th Century all look contemporary. I just can't believe they're as old as claimed.