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Gaudi’s cracked-pottery mosaics in the Parc Guell, Barcelona
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This is an honest to goodness rug I got to design for a project called Node run by Chris Haughton. There are some pretty great other rugs too. You can see (and purchase) them here: http://designmuseumshop.com/themes/exclusive-node-rugs
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Prefab house concept for Alcoa by Charles W. Moore and William Turnbill (via Mid-Centuria)
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Why not build an airport that floats in the Thames Estuary?
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After his acceptance speech TED curator Chris Anderson turned the auditoriums in Long Beach and La Quinta into a synergistic Baptist revival-style celebration of support. Pledge cards were distributed immediately to everyone in the rooms at both locations — they bear more than a passing resemblance to the envelopes and plates passed around right after the sermons in my old Presbyterian church. Audience members from large and small companies got up to pledge monetary and administrative support, and the mood was electric. Chris Anderson was the fiery yet graceful pastor, his fervor directed not at Jesus but at Mitra’s minimalistic school. This was the new type of religion I’ve often envisioned: the exuberant dedication of emotional and physical resources to a proven force of good, not to an irrational faith-based deity. This was a church without a god. Well maybe Bono is its god but that is a story for a different day.
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But avoiding the words that people didn’t use back then is ultimately just a mechanical problem. A Princeton history graduate student, Ben Schmidt, has actually written a program that tags all the phrases in a script that don’t appear in the books of its era. The bigger challenge is to convey the meanings of the words that people did use, especially when they resonate differently now. “Equality,” “prejudice,” “race” itself — how can you have mid-19th-century characters use words like those without anachronistically evoking the connotations they have for us? To many of Lincoln’s contemporaries and even his allies, “equality” still evoked alarming echoes of the French Revolution. To speak of “race equality” implied not just that people should all be treated alike, but that the races really were morally and intellectually equivalent. That seems self-evident to us, but it was an extreme and dubious proposition to all but a few radical Republicans, like Thaddeus Stevens. Lincoln himself almost certainly didn’t believe it, nor did the prominent scientists of the age. In fact, the phrase “race equality” was the phrase the defenders of slavery threw at Republicans to charge that they wanted to raise Negros to the same status as whites and encourage miscegenation — charges the Republicans indignantly and sincerely denied.
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East Lake Park, Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1920s. I grew up right next to East Lake but can’t quite figure out where this is — maybe down at the eastern tip of the lake?