T R U S T   M E

 

Courtyard - Plaza
Courtyard of Beauty Berlin, Germany Hackesche Hofe

The center of Berlin hosts, similar to a plaza in service to the whole collective in residence, a complex of eight interconnected courtyards, accessed through a main arched entrance at number 40 Rosenthaler Straße. The first courtyard features Art Nouveau facades and opulent designed interiors, designed by the architect August Endell.
Architects Kurt Berndt and August Endell designed the fabulous sequence of interlinked courtyards around 1906. Today much of the construction, tiling decoration, and original art has been restored and augmented soas to provide an atmosphere for restaurants, small shops filled with renown European local colour, and living quarters. The adaptive design offers an example of Aquarian Age lifestyle possibility.

 

CHARTRES CATHEDRAL - The Labyrinth

Check the most famous of all Irish prehistoric monuments, Newgrange, one of the finest European passage-tombs.
The base of the mound is retained by no less than 97 large stones, lying horizontally, many of which bear beautifully carved designs of spirals, lozenges, zigzags, and other symbols. The most famous of these is the stone marking the entrance, with carvings of a triple spiral, double spirals, concentric semi-circles, and lozenges similar to those found in Brittany (France), at Gavrinis.

Above the entrance passage is a 'roof-box', which precisely aligns with the rising sun at the winter solstice of 21 December, so that the rays touch the ground at the very centre of the tomb for about 20 minutes. Many of the upright stones along the walls of the 19m (62ft) passage, which follows the rise of the hill, are richly decorated.

 

 

GARDEN SPECIAL EFFECTS

Judith Mann is a pyrotechnician who uses her skills to create special effect installations for the backyards of her clients. She can create fog, burning water and pretty well anything you want her to do just like magic. The beauty of Mann's landscape designs can be enjoyed by turning on a hidden installation, activated at the press of a button. The fog creates a timelessness in parts of the overall garden scene and can be set to release the sweet-smelling fragrance of flowers that grow in this little wonder-world. The mechanism is easily controlled and may be modified according to whim for meditation or entertaining friends, time of day, or mood of the overall environment.

          

tape Lifestyle Europe here
Garden of Fog
Designer: Judith Mann

Location: Laupheim, Germany

Garden of Fog

 

 

RIVENDELL

  Arwen's Garden

Ideal Arrangement

The art of placement is as old as Methuselah. It has been studied in every culture since we moved out of the garden, into the alternative universe we occupy today. The art of dowsing, combined with other systems, adds accuracy to the arrrangements established by the energy management template herein. Modifications to the template should be part of the process now that we approach a solid transition into Aquarian archetypes.

The ancient Chinese found that
A house sited halfway up a hill
On the north side of the river
Facing south
Received optimal sun, was protected from harsh winds,
Avoided floods,
And still had access to water for crops.

In such surroundings, it was easiest to survive: rice, vegetables, and fruit-bearing trees grew under an unhindered sun, cattle grazed on lush grass, and a house stayed relatively warm in the winter. The environment proved comfortable and harmonious, and helped inhabitants to survive and to grow successful and even wealthy. When that significant, auspicious, and ideal space was unattainable, the search for antidotes led to the study of feng shui. Soon thereafter, the pursuit and fabrication of a viable physical setting became a basic environmental science, with its goal the control of man’s immediate surroundings. The basic message of feng shui is: Harmonize with, do not disrupt, nature.

 

 

MAKE-OVER

In 2001 Jim Wasserman wrote:

“MOUNTAIN VIEW, California – That epicenter of holiday shopping, the enclosed suburban mall that came to symbolize 1980s culture, is becoming a powerful engine for redeveloping California. Malls where millions of teen-agers had their first kiss and suburban families roamed the food courts are being razed and reborn as entirely new visions for life, work and shopping, architects say.

Stepping in where several malls have died, Californians are pioneering an old-fashioned return to downtown and Main Street, blending offices and restaurants with homes above stores.

Unlike the origin of shopping malls, which wooed stores out of downtown cores in the 1960s and 1970s, their renovations a generation later are considered urban infill projects.

“It’s ironic. When we built them they were on the edges, and now they’re in the center of our towns, “ says Joe Scanga, principal at Calthorpe Associates, a Berkeley-based architecture firm.

In Mountain View, Scarga’s firm designed an 18-acre residential neighborhood known as The Crossings on the site of a Silicon Valley favorite: the Old Mill Mall. In the 1970s shoppers strolled among indoor trees, creeks and waterfalls.”

Now there are 397 townhouses, apartments and houses built on foundations of the crushed mall. The atmosphere feels like the early part of the Twentieth Century, like historic San Francisco near the Crookedest Street in the World, at Leavenworth and Chestnut. The Princeton Fitness and Wellness Center, in Princeton, New Jersey, has been open in a renovated Grand Union grocery store since May 19, 2003. The size of the building is 52,000 square feet, and is one of 4 facilities that the company owns, the largest being a 94,000 square foot building that is a renovated Ames department store. The Guitar Center in New Orleans, LA, is a major national chain that sells guitars, keyboards, drums, other musical instruments, and a mass amount of gear and accesories for musicians of all types. It replaced the old Home Depot.

Near the nation’s first mall, the 1956-era Southdale Mall in Edina, Minn, Jon Jerde designed the cathedral of mall culture, the Mall of America. Now, he says, more people want something old that’s new again: Main Street environments and downtown-like experiences. In his hometown of Long Beach, Jerde designed CityPlace, an urban mix of houses and stores now under construction to replace dying indoor Long Beach Plaza.

Although California has the most examples of these mall conversions, dead malls are being reborn across the nation. For example, in Denver, a city hall moved into a vacated department store. Congress for the New Urbanism lists national trendsetters redeveloping enclosed shopping malls to new uses:

Mountain View, CA – 18-acre Old Mill Mall converted to The Crossings: 397 houses, apartments and townhouses.

Boca Raton, Fla. 28-acre Boca Raton Mall rebuilt as Mizner Park with stores, offices, museum and 272 apartments.

New Rochelle, New York 16-acre New Rochelle Mall converted to New Roc City, with stores, offices, hotel and hockey arena.

Bountiful, Utah – 20-acre Five Points Mall becoming Renaissance Town Centre with offices, stores and sports complex.

Sources: Jim Wasserman The Associated Press
Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU)

 

 

 

Almost invisible mirrored tree house built in Sweden

They said it couldn't be done. When we first wrote about the almost invisible tree house to be built in Sweden by Tham & Videgard, 899 commenters thought it was computer-generated eye candy, impossible to build, and death for birds.

But the architects built it, one of six units in a "Treehotel," which recently opened 40 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Sweden.

source: Lloyd Alter, TreeHugger [yahoo]

see The Enchantress, Trump XI

 

 

President Obama - Gifts of Service on MLK Day

The White House blog - mobile apps healthy kid apps
First Lady's Healthy Kids Fair

 

 

Marin County Civic Center: Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright said, "We know that the good building is not the one that hurts the landscape, but is one that makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before that building was built. In Marin County you have one of the most beautiful landscapes I have seen, and I am proud to make the buildings of this County characteristic of the beauty of the County."

 

 

Martha Graham
shaping space

In 1935 dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, began a lifelong collaboration with Isamu Noguchi, one of the twentieth century’s most important and critically acclaimed sculptors, who designed stage sets and backdrops, and fascinating, innovative, domesticated furniture. Others who worked with Noguchi include George Balanchine, John Cage, Jean Cocteau, Merce Cunningham, Salvador Dali, and more.

Graham had a marvelous visual sense. Her ability to create textural atmosphere opened doors. She was inspired in the style and look she gave fashion and often designed her company's costumes.

 

 

 

Mount Angel Abbey Library, Alvar Aalto 1970

Mount Angel Abbey Library was built by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto for the monks of the Benedictine abbey, who approached him in the early 1960s. Aalto had already built five other libraries in his native Finland, was intrigued by the site and accepted the commission after being personally visited in Switzerland by friars from the Oregon monastery.

Mount Angel Abbey Library is located approximately 40 miles south of Portland, Oregon, at One Abbey Drive, St. Benedict (Mount Angel).

Some critics have dismissed it as a lesser work in his oeuvre, while others praise it as one of his best. Regardless, it’s one of only two buildings in North America by Aalto – the only one on the West Coast – and therefore, unless you plan on visiting Finland, offers a rare chance to actually experience the work of this great master. And this is a building that simply must be experienced first hand…

Mart Schaefer 2005

The Creator's Words - inside story here

"When I personally have some architectural problem to solve, I am constantly . . . faced with an obstacle difficult to surmount, a kind of "three in the morning feeling." The reason seems to be the complicated, heavy burden represented by the fact that architectural planning operates with innumerable elements which often conflict. Social, human, economic and technical demands combined with psychological questions affecting both the individual and the group, together with movements of human masses and individuals, and internal frictions Ð all these form a complex tangle which cannot be unravelled in a rational or mechanical way. The immense number of different demands and component problems constitute a barrier from behind which it is difficult for the basic idea to emerge . . . I forget the entire mass of problems for a while, after the atmosphere of the job and the innumerable difficult requirements have sunk into my subconscious. Then I move on to a method of working which is very much like abstract art. I just draw by instinct, not architectural synthesis, but what are sometimes childlike compositions, and in this way, on this abstract basis, the main idea gradually takes shape, a kind of universal substance which helps me to bring innumerable contradictory component problems into harmony."

— Alvar Aalto
from Malcolm Quantril. Alvar Aalto: A Critical Study. New York: Shocken Books, 1983. p5.

 

 

 

SPHINX HILL
On the Thames River in Oxfordshire

Thameside home built for an Egyptologist (British Museum) and senior QC true to the style of a classic Egyptian temple. Architect John Outram challenges convention and raises your spirits instantly.
Bright desert colours and geometric lines help create the impression the architecture is both modern and ancient at the same time. From a distance the front of the building supports several large scarlet sun disks, representing the power of the sun god in his full strength, mystically present in nature as a hawk/falcon seated on a throne. The energy is matched within - a fire inside a pyramid in one room, Charles Jencks table and chairs, and an indoor infinity pool.
Construction started in spring 1998, with completion in Spring 1999.

images The Egyptian House (Sphinx Hill), Oxfordshire

 

 

 

Whaling Wall Number 63

background: Wyland’s idea for painting whales on the sides of buildings developed quite naturally from the difficulty he was having in portraying the mammoth creatures on small canvasses. In 1978, his desire to paint whales lifesize led him up and down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Diego to San Francisco until he finally found the "perfect wall" in Laguna Beach.

Laguna's long history as an internationally known art colony, its coastal location and the fact that the grey whales migrate along its shoreline each year made it the best choice for Wyland's first lifesize mural.
-THE ART OF WYLAND

 

William Shatner - on whale song wavelength. William Shatner took his family on a whale watch excursion in Summer 2007. He took the cameras along as well.

William Shatner discusses successful campaign to save the endangered Blue Whale
and how that same "can do" spirit can be put to use
Whale of a page

 

Whatever Happened to "Save the Whales"?

We're still killing the creatures with the biggest brains
on the planet—to make dog food

By Douglas H. Chadwick
July/August 2008

.... Western society has been liberated from one myth after another by science. But the people-animal border is particularly well defended by social and religious precepts. Crossing it seriously threatens our sense of supremacy, our meaning and identity, Homo sapiens' cherished place as grand marshal leading the pageant of existence--in short, the whole framework we use to define our lives. Extending too many evocative mental and emotional qualities to animals also implies revising human activities that exploit other species. Our economic systems, not to mention our moral universe, are suddenly called into question.

This is a very uncomfortable place for science to be. Good. That's how you know you're on a true frontier, which is where a good scientist ought to be stationed. I don't know what the outcome will be. I'm not arguing in favor of "woo-woo" science or promoting cetaceans as gurus of the briny deep. But I do know that frontiers are where today's unthinkables turn into tomorrow's facts.

Douglas H. Chadwick's latest book for Sierra Club Books, The Grandest of Lives: Eye to Eye With Whales, was reissued this spring in paperback. This article grew out of a 2007 speech Chadwick gave to the American Cetacean Society.

 

 

 

10 Forward Star Trek galley, Colour Us Inn, Indiana Jones Menu, Innholders' Company
It's All In The Sauce, Jupiter Table, magic spice, Mercury Table, Oracle's Lab, shrmx, smoothie, Starlight Inn -Star Wars, tangerine, vittles, Western Inn, Zeppelin Diner