When I was a kid my favorite relative was Uncle Caveman. After school we'd all go play in his cave, and every once in a while he would eat one of us.

APARTMENT THERAPY

The home of The Sleeper family (Curtis, Deborah, and their three kids) who live in a cave. Literally. It's a 17,000 square foot gouge in the earth that dates back to a 1930s sandstone mine in Festus, Missouri. Measuring in at 45 feet underneath a forest, this unusual home has to be seen to be believed.

“I Now Have Absolute Proof That Smoking Even One Marijuana Cigarette is Equal in Brain Damage to Being on Bikini Island During an H-bomb Blast.”

Environmental Graffiti

Costa Rica, Cleanest Nation in the World, Environmentally… Costa Rica already has an excellent reputation in the sphere of green issues. It has protected areas which cover more than a quarter of the tiny Central American republic, including national parks and jungle reserves. It already uses renewable energy to generate more than 96 per cent of its energy and it plans to further reduce and offset the emissions created from agriculture, transport and industry. The environment Minister, Roberto Dobles said the state would promote the use of hybrid vehicles and planting of trees through economic compensation. Landowners are paid to grow trees to capture carbon and protect watersheds.

This, according to Esteban Brenes, a conservation finance specialist at the WWF, is the secret of Costa Rica’s success “The fact that Costa Rica has applied the payments on a national scale is what’s innovative.” This is the reason why countries such as Norway are losing out in the race to become carbon neutral. Critics however, point to the fact that Costa Rica has a poor reputation regarding national corruption and that landowners should be compensated for growing crops rather than trees.

Their logic is based on the fact that an already poor country could get poorer through a false economy of tree-planting and that the money could be put to better use, such as improving social justice. Critics are also quick to suggest that this may be part of a larger marketing strategy to put the country “on the map.”

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Do You Realize That If We Played By The Rules Right Now We'd Be In Gym?

Now you can own a peice of Saturday morning movie rerun history. The house(in the above photos) that appeared in the 1986 John Hughes movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where it was the fictional home of Ferris’ best friend, Cameron Frye (played by Alan Ruck) is up for sale by Sotheby’s.

The house was designed by architects A. James Speyer and David Haid, both students of Mies van der Rohe. The home’s steel and glass International Style shows Mies’ influence, and the floor-to-ceiling windows provide 360-degree views of the surrounding woods. All just for a measly 2.3 million.

New Dandyisim

When I See an Adult on a Bicycle, I Do Not Despair for the Future of the Human Race.

In what looks to be a solid combination of Germany’s fixed gear community and stunning cinematography, the latest upcoming video project to emerge revolving around cycling is seen here with Fixed City. The trailer delves into the lives and inspirations of various personalities.

Hypebeast

fixed city | Trailer updated! from fixed city on Vimeo.

I Appreciate Preservation. It's What You Do When You Run for President. You Gotta Preserve.”

WTC Logo Preservation Project by Ji Lee
New York designer Ji Lee has launched a project to collect photographs of logos that show the former World Trade Center in a New York skyline. Lee publishes the photos on the project website; anyone can contribute by uploading their own images. “These logos will not last forever as many of the small business will either update their logos at some point or close their doors eventually,” says Lee.By collecting and publishing the logos, he hopes to preserve the towers’ iconic image. Visit www.wtclogo.com to contribute.

Here’s an explanation from Ji Lee:

After 9/11, I started to noticed the Twin Towers in many logos containing the New York City skyline. These were mostly from small businesses: dry cleaners, delis, movers, and so on. I experienced a strange mix of sadness and joy seeing the iconic Towers standing there majestically, as if nothing happened. These logos will not last forever as many of the small business will either update their logos at some point or close their doors eventually. Thus the Twin Towers would sadly vanish forever. In order to preserve them, I started photographing them whenever I found one – and there are many of them around. Soon it became an enjoyable game every time I was on the streets of New York, like a treasure hunt which never ceases to be rewarding.

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DEEZEN

I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed

images courtesy of Chris Jordan

Environmental Graffiti

Interview - Chris Jordan

Like a magician, Seattle-based artist Chris Jordan first conceals everyday objects like cans, tooth picks and paper cups, just to throw them in our face when an image is viewed in detail. In an interview with Environmental Graffiti, the photographic artist talks about the inspiration for his mind-boggling artworks, viewers’ reactions to them and works in the pipeline.

Viewers who are familiar with Chris Jordan’s work will remember their reaction to his images as much as the photographic images themselves. For those new to his work, let’s simulate what visitors to one of his exhibitions experience by looking at a full view of one of his images and then slowly zooming in.

Unlike the Magic Eye images that were a craze in the ‘90s, viewers of Jordan’s images don’t set out looking for the hidden image in the picture; they’re hit by it quite unpreparedly. Let’s hear what the artist has to say about his images and the effect they have on viewers.

EG: You are taking ordinary objects and recycling them into art

, creating something beautiful at first glance, whose message kicks in later. Have visitors to your exhibitions commented on this “oh” effect?

Chris Jordan: It’s fun for me to go to exhibitions because there’s a double layer to my work. Seen from a distance, the images are like something else, maybe totally boring pieces of modern art. On closer view, the visitor has an almost unpleasant experience with the artwork. It’s almost a magic trick; inviting people to a conversation that they didn’t want to have in the first place. One visitor recently compared me to a “sleight-of-hands-magician” that makes people face up to a difficult truth, I quite liked that.

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Modern Technology Owes Ecology an Apology

There is growing appreciation that outer space has become a trash bin, with the Earth encircled by dead or dying spacecraft, along with menacing bits of orbital clutter - some of which burns up in the planet's atmosphere. The big news of late was a smashup of a commercial Iridium satellite with a defunct Russian spacecraft earlier this year. Then there was that 2007 anti-satellite test by China, purposely destroying one of its aging weather satellites. These events produced large debris fields in space – adding to the swamp of cosmic compost. But I sense a line of research that needs exploring: The overall impact of human-made orbital debris, solid and liquid propellant discharges, and other space age substance abuse that winds up in a 2 high-speed dive through Earth's atmosphere. There's a convenient toss away line that is in vogue: that such space refuse simply "burns up" – a kind of out of sight, out of mind declaration. What chemistry is involved given the high heating during reentry of space leftovers made of tungsten, beryllium, aluminum and lots of composite materials? The impact of these materials on Earth's atmosphere - top to bottom – would seem worthy of investigation.

Ozone depletion - As for total mass of uncontrolled objects that re-enter each year – it's in the range of 70 – 80 metric tons. And that's the trackable, big stuff – never mind smaller bits of orbital jetsam like bubbles of still-radioactive coolant that has been leaked from old nuclear-powered Soviet satellites. One study team that looked into the impact of de-orbiting space debris on stratospheric ozone issued their findings back in 1994. The work was done by an aerospace industry firm for the Environmental Management Division of the Space and Missile Systems Center. They reported that objects re-entering the atmosphere can affect ozone in several ways, but not on a significant level globally. Indeed, as an object plows through the Earth's stratosphere...

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Colors Don't Clash for Good. Color Me Happy Next to You. Oh, Just Like it Should, There Goes the Neighborhood.

ED RUSCHA

Barack Obama is taking on health care, financial regulation, torture and environmental policy. He’s also revamping the White House art collection.

The Obamas are sending ripples through the art world as they put the call out to museums, galleries and private collectors that they’d like to borrow modern art by African-American, Asian, Hispanic and female artists for the White House. In a sharp departure from the 19th-century still lifes, pastorals and portraits that dominate the White House’s public rooms, they are choosing bold, abstract art works.

The overhaul is an important event for the art market. The Obamas’ art choices could affect the market values of the works and artists they decide to display. Museums and collectors have been moving quickly to offer up works for inclusion in the iconic space.

Their choices also, inevitably, have political implications, and could serve as a savvy tool to drive the ongoing message of a more inclusive administration. The Clintons received political praise after they selected Simmie Knox, an African-American artist from Alabama, to paint their official portraits. The Bush administration garnered approval for acquiring “The Builders,” a painting by African-American artist Jacob Lawrence, but also some criticism for the picture, which depicts black men doing menial labor.

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Sn'P Shakers

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“Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.”

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation announced today that The LEGO Group is now the exclusive licensed manufacturer of Frank Lloyd Wright Collection® LEGO Architecture sets.

The LEGO Group and Adam Reed Tucker of Brickstructures, Inc. officially introduced the LEGO Architecture line in 2008. The line currently consists of six buildings – now including two of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous and recognizable buildings, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and “Fallingwater.”

With models developed in collaboration with architects, LEGO Architecture works to inspire future architects, engineers and designers as well as architecture fans around the world with the LEGO brick as a medium. Builders of all ages can now collect and construct their favorite worldwide architectural sites through these artistic replicas.

Both exclusive Frank Lloyd Wright LEGO Architecture sets contain booklets that feature traditional building instructions along with exclusive archival historical material and photographs of each iconic building.

It’s expected to go on sale this July, pricing is still unknown but should be around $55. What is known is that it looks brilliant and that I want one.

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"Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down".

MIT architects and engineers have unveiled EyeStop, an interactive bus stop designed for the city of Florence, Italy. On Saturday 16 May the project was be presented officially at the Genio Fiorentino by the President of the Province of Florence Matteo Renzi (dubbed ‘The Italian Obama’ by TIME Magazine). EyeStop, developed by MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, is an exploration into the next generation of smart urban furniture; it aims to enrich the city with state of the art sensing technologies, interactive services, community information and entertainment. The project is partially covered with touch sensitive e‐INK and screens, so that it can deliver information to people seamlessly. Users can plan a bus trip on an interactive map, exchange community‐relevant information on a digital message board, surf the web, monitor their real time exposure to pollutants and use their mobile devices as an interface with the bus shelter. “Interacting with EyeStop could change the access to urban information in a similar way to how the iPhone has changed our mobile life” ...

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“New York has more hermits than will be found in all the forests, mountains and deserts of the United States”

Secrets of the Deep

What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? For starters, a 350-foot steamship, 1,600 bars of silver, a freight train, and four-foot-long cement-eating worms.

The steady transformation of New York’s waterfront from wasteland to playground means more New Yorkers are spending time along the city’s edge. That can lead a person to wonder: What, exactly, is down there? Until recently, The People of New York had patchy knowledge of what lies beneath the surface of one of the world’s busiest harbors. What they did know came largely from random anecdotes, and depth soundings done the way Henry Hudson did them—by rope and lead sinker. This first GPS-era picture comes from the team at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who have methodically swept the lower Hudson with state-of-the-art sonar. LDEO’s Dr. Frank Nitsche stitched together their data, along with several other researchers’ work, into this elegant color-keyed map, which they supplemented by talking with sea captains, historians, and the divers pictured . There’s a whole other city down there...

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Sucka's on My Jock When I Walk Down the Block

Pictures of the new SUPERDEUX project called AUTO, to be released later this year thru ARTOYZ ORIGINALS. There is a USB Key inside the GhettoBlaster, but it’s not AUTO itself.

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“Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.”

the puppet show' is a new photographic work by italian studio winkler+noah. 30 portraits of children aged between two to eight years old were taken and transformed into dolls by subtle retouching. the studios' statement was 'the best present we can give to children is to let them be children'. the project has received two international awards from the american photography of new york and has been published in the volume '200 best photographers worldwide' by luerzers archive.

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"One thing that cycling has taught me is that if you can achieve something without a struggle it's not going to be satisfying.”

“A closed mind is like a closed book; just a block of wood”

Environmental Graffiti

While leviathan music festivals like the Glastonbury are likely to be more familiar to your ears, some wonder about the impact and future sustainability of events where a mass of tents with the population of a small city is assembled and then dispensed with in the space of a weekend. That’s where a festival like WOOD comes in. Small but perfectly formed, WOOD is the UK’s coolest summer festival – a music event that is also packed with activities aimed at highlighting green issues and promoting an eco-friendly lifestyle. And the best bit? It’s powered by completely renewable energy sources.

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“I think it's romantic when someone offers me a seat on the subway"

environmental graffiti

5 Abandoned Stations of the New York Subway System

New York City is a fascinating place, and that includes its underground too. With one of the oldest subway systems in the world, it is the site of abandoned stations, levels and platforms galore. Here we are taking an underground tour around those located beneath popular stations travelled by millions each day… The New York City subway is one of the busiest metro systems in the world, trailing only Tokyo, Moscow and Seoul. Some of the active stations below or above the abandoned ones depicted here are some of the busiest on the system. Somewhat creepy to think that the subway’s secrets are so close to many, yet so far.

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Takashi Murakami releases preview of ‘Superflat First Love’ for Louis Vuitton

In 2003, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and Marc Jacobs collaborated on a new multicolor monogram for Louis Vuitton, resulting in a runaway hit. Murakami made an animated short for the line, ‘Superflat Monogram.’ In the fall of 2007, ‘©Murakami’ opened at MOCA Los Angeles, complete with a Louis Vuitton store in the museum, to the ire of museum purists. The show later traveled to the Brooklyn Museum. Murakami has partnered with Louis Vuitton for a new line, called ‘Multicolore Spring Palette,’ and made a new video for this line, too, titled ‘Superflat First Love.’ The five-minute video is currently available in Japan as a mobile download, but a preview has been uploaded to YouTube and can be seen below.



Art Observed

VELODROME

LA FIXED

on the Streets of TORONTO

"I just finished installing a project that I have been working on since the new year commissioned by The Royal Ontario Museum and the Contact Photography Festival. The work has all been installed inside the Museum, as part of Housepaint, a larger project more specifically about homelessness and shelter. And for the purposes of working in my usual way and to create a juxtaposition between indoor and outdoor, I have also put the work up illegally in numerous spots around Toronto.

The project is called the Unaddressed and it focuses on the under-housed, giving voice to their personal opinions. Over the course of 3 months I met with 18 individuals who are currently or have recently been homeless. Through meeting, talking about their lives and discussing issues that were important to them, they developed their announcements and created a cardboard sign to reveal them. By photographing homeless and formerly homeless individuals holding cardboard signs that announce their concerns, the hope is challenge preconceived notions of homelessness and make the passers-by realize how serious the situation is and that everybody deserves the same basic necessities of life and to be treated the same way. Basically do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

This was definitely the hardest project that I have worked on in terms of trying to get it right, as you guys like to say. I want the viewer to feel compassion for these individuals and others like them, without feeling pity. I wanted the subjects to feel empowered without being exploited. I wanted the work to have presence in its aesthetic, yet hold true to the fact that these people often blend into the background when they are out in the city."....

Wooster Collective

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.”