The Revitalist

Ordinarily, I wouldn't touch politics here with a ten foot pole, but the story of Mount Myrtle caught my eye. It's a good example of a town showcasing its natural assets for the rare national audience that comes with a Presidential election. It's a huge sand sculpture of the Republican party candidates—47 truck loads of sand—built right before the debate. As a way of keeping the spotlight as long as they can, they are looking for a creative way to dismantle the Mount. Any Dems out there looking to sabotage a Republican?

When I was a kid there was a house in my neighborhood that had two small windows with awnings facing out on the main street. It looked so much like a building with eyes and white aluminum eyebrows. I always liked that house – it seemed so friendly.

See the eyes?

Apparently lots of other people see faces in buildings, too. They have been contributing their photos of these faces to a Flickr group Faces In Places, which also shows up at a blog of the same name. This is definitely one for the blog roll.

Found this through Swiss Miss, which is, by the way, a fantastic design blog. 

Mosaics in the 86th Street station.

... the New York Transit Museum has opened "Squire Vickers and the Subway's Modern Age," which is the second part of an exhibition on the subway's architecture and design. Vickers, who was also a painter, served as the system's lead designer for almost 30 years, in the 1910's, 20's and 30's. His work, which included a large number of mosaics (inexpensive, durable and easy to clean, as well as, beautiful), was heavily influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and provided a Modern counterpoint to the subway's original Beaux-Arts designs. "Instead of disguising the steel and concrete structure of the subway, Arts and Crafts design allowed Vickers to celebrate the subway’s underlying industrial character, exposing concrete vaulted ceilings and leaving steel girders unadorned," says the exhibition curator.

From "Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West" at the Newberry Library, Nov 3, 2007 - Feb 16, 2008

... add the Festival of Maps to your list of cultural activities (via Where). Over 25 museums, cultural and scientific institutions are participating, from The Field Museum to the University of Chicago to the Chicago Botanic Garden. Events range from exhibitions of map collections to tours and symposiums, all focused on mankind's exploration of the Earth and  how we translate that quest into visual information. Looks like there is some very cool stuff! Events run from November 2007 into 2008.

The weekend real estate section in the Globe had a good article on small, ex-urban towns drawing artists to their downtowns. The primary example was Renaissance Lofts in Marlborough, which is in need of downtown reinvestment but seems an unlikely place for an artist colony. And you have to give Deborah Fairbanks credit, the before pictures of the mill with its windows mostly blocked in are pretty grim. It took some vision to see that and think artists. The article also quotes Richard Florida who says, "You'll see more of this in the suburbs. And it's all about the fact that they're proximate to Boston. In Arkansas or the Dakotas, this might not succeed." That's good news for some of the more remote mills, ones that aren't necessarily right next to the commuter rail. Let's hope this project succeeds and sparks ideas for some of the more challenging buildings.

Performance art meets building rehabilitation in Liverpool, England (via BLDGBLOG).  British sculptor Richard Wilson has created a piece entitled Turning The Place Over. He has cut an egg-shaped section out of a building's facade and engineered it to rotate 360º before astonished passersby. At a project cost of £450,000, there is bound to be some discussion about useful allocation of resources, but there is no doubt that this is astounding to watch.

A new redevelopment in Hyde Park will offer market rate artist studios, something relatively rare on the market these days. Long-time Boston developer Harold Brown, The Hamilton Company, is rehabbing part of Westinghouse Plaza, formerly a shop for manufacturing industrial fans, into the Lofts at Westinghouse. The 62 units will have live/work studios ranging from 967-1,161 sf, selling at $200,000-$245,000, and 640 sf, live-only units for $165,000. These studios will add to the growing artist community in Hyde Park, largely represented by the Hyde Park Art Association. Heidi Burbidge, from the BRA's Artist Space Initiative says, "We're excited about it because this is the first time we'll really see what the demand is for market-rate artist space."

We'll be watching closely. We're considering artist space in a few of our projects, and it will be interesting to see how the market rate stuff fares. From what we've heard, price is the driving factor when it comes to artist studios. It's tough to rehab a building in Boston and keep costs low enough for the artists, but these prices should attract a lot of attention.