Kodachrome achieved for National Geographic what its writers seldom could, capturing America as a dreamspace, where the most familiar sights become places of fascination. We laugh when William Graves describes Mobile as a “hauntingly beautiful land,” but there’s little other way to describe the window National Geographic’s photographers opened onto postwar American life. David Boyer’s 1966 time-lapse portrait of a blazing neon street in Casper, Wyoming, could have inspired a Stuart Davis painting. James Blair’s image of Big Sur from the same year depicts the coast in a dusk wash of purple and pink. The monotone is interrupted by two easily missed signs of human intrusion: a small streak of red curving along the coastal road—a car’s taillight—and a speck of yellow in a hilltop house, perhaps a lamp. The effect is unspeakably lonely. Bruce Dale’s 1965 image of the incomplete St. Louis Arch shows the monument’s two legs emerging from a thick fog, as if it were being built in the Arctic depths, or perhaps on a bad movie-set depiction of heaven. In 1969, James Amos used a fisheye lens to contort the oppressive buildings of Atlanta’s Peachtree Center into a vertiginous swirl. If it weren’t for the jet plane in the corner of Walter Edwards’s aerial photo of the same year, the Grand Canyon would be unrecognizable as a place on Earth.These photos are not the sharpest, particularly by the crystalline standard of the magazine’s contemporary digital images. Distant objects tend to haze and smudge in Kodachrome. But the colors have a richness that seems sourced in deeper springs; taking a razor to one of these images, you’d half-expect colors to ooze, sap-like, through the gash. This contrast between rich color and ill-defined backgrounds creates an intimacy that is lost in digital photos. The latter have become ever more lifelike and, correspondingly, have lost the lyricism of the earlier photos. Kodachrome, on the other hand, took the familiar and made it strange, representing the world while changing it.
Gaudi’s cracked-pottery mosaics in the Parc Guell, Barcelona
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
Prefab house concept for Alcoa by Charles W. Moore and William Turnbill (via Mid-Centuria)
Why not build an airport that floats in the Thames Estuary?
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.
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.