Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Louis Henri Sullivan


Louis Sullivan was born to an Irish-born father and a Swiss-born mother, both of whom had emigrated to the United States in the late 1840s. He grew up living with his grandmother in South Reading (now Wakefield), Massachusetts. Louis spent most of his childhood learning about nature while on his grandparent’s farm. In the later years of his primary education, his experiences varied quite a bit. He would spend a lot of time by himself wandering around Boston. He explored every street looking at the surrounding buildings. This was around the time when he developed his fascination with buildings and he decided he would one day become a structural engineer/architect. While attending high school Sullivan met Moses Woolson, whose teachings made a lasting impression on him, and nurtured him until his death. After graduating from high school, Sullivan studied architecture briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Learning that he could both graduate from high school a year early and pass up the first two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by passing a series of examinations, Sullivan entered MIT at the age of sixteen. After one year of study, he moved to Philadelphia and talked himself into a job with architect Frank Furness.

The Depression of 1873 dried up much of Furness’s work, and he was forced to let Sullivan go. At that point Sullivan moved on to Chicago in 1873 to take part in the building boom following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He worked for William LeBaron Jenney, the architect often credited with erecting the first steel-frame building. After less than a year with Jenney, Sullivan moved to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts for a year. Renaissance art inspired Sullivan’s mind, and he was influenced to direct his architecture to emulating Michelangelo's spirit of creation rather than replicating the styles of earlier periods. He returned to Chicago and began work for the firm of Joseph S. Johnston & John Edelman as a draftsman. Johnston & Edleman were commissioned for interior design of the Moody Tabernacle, which was completed by Sullivan.[2] In 1879 Dankmar Adler hired Sullivan; a year later, he became a partner in the firm. This marked the beginning of Sullivan's most productive years. And it was at this firm that Sullivan would deeply influence a young designer named Frank Lloyd Wright, who came to embrace Sullivan's designs and principles as the inspiration for his own work.

Adler and Sullivan initially achieved fame as theater architects. While most of their theaters were in Chicago, their fame won commissions as far west as Pueblo, Colorado, and Seattle, Washington (unbuilt). The culminating project of this phase of the firm's history was the 1889 Auditorium Building in Chicago, an extraordinary mixed-use building which included not only a 3000-seat theater, but also a hotel and office building. Adler and Sullivan reserved the top floor of the tower for their own office. After 1889 the firm became known for their office buildings, particularly the 1891 Wainwright Building in St. Louis and the 1899 Carson Pirie Scott Department Store on State Street in Chicago, Louis Sullivan is considered by many to be the first architect to fully imagine and realize a rich architectural vocabulary for a revolutionary new kind of building: the steel high-rise.

Sullivan and the steel high-rise

Prior to the late 19th century, the weight of a multistory building had to be supported principally by the strength of its walls. The taller the building, the more strain this placed on the lower sections of the building; since there were clear engineering limits to the weight such "load-bearing" walls could sustain, large designs meant massively thick walls on the ground floors, and definite limits on the building's height.

The development of cheap, versatile steel in the second half of the 19th century changed those rules. America was in the midst of rapid social and economic growth that made for great opportunities in architectural design. A much more urbanized society was forming and the society called out for new, larger buildings. The mass production of steel was the main driving force behind the ability to build skyscrapers during the mid 1880s. As seen with the data below the prices dropped significantly during this period.

Price of Steel at Bessemer Steel Rails from 1867-1895 ($/ton)

1867- $166; 1870- $107; 1875- $69; 1880- $68; 1885- $29; 1890- $32; 1895- $32

The people in Midwestern America felt less social pressure to conform to the ways and styles of the architectural past. By assembling a framework of steel girders, architects and builders could suddenly create tall, slender buildings with a strong and relatively delicate steel skeleton. The rest of the building's elements - the walls, floors, ceilings, and windows - were suspended from the steel, which carried the weight. This new way of constructing buildings, so-called "column-frame" construction, pushed them up rather than out. The steel weight-bearing frame allowed not just taller buildings, but permitted much larger windows, which meant more daylight reaching interior spaces. Interior walls became thinner, which created more usable floor space.

Chicago's Monadnock Building (which was not designed by Sullivan) literally straddles this remarkable moment of transition: the northern half of the building, finished in 1891, is of load-bearing construction, while the southern half, finished only two years later, is column-frame. (While experiments in this new technology were taking place in many cities, Chicago was the crucial laboratory. Industrial capital and civic pride drove a surge of new construction throughout the city's downtown in the wake of the 1871 fire.)

The technical limits of weight-bearing masonry had always imposed formal as well as structural constraints; those constraints were suddenly gone. None of the historical precedents were any help, and this new freedom created a kind of technical and stylistic crisis.

Sullivan was the first to cope with that crisis. He addressed it by embracing the changes that came with the steel frame, creating a grammar of form for the high rise (base, shaft, and pediment), simplifying the appearance of the building by breaking away from historical styles, using his own intricate flora designs, in vertical bands, to draw the eye upwards and emphasize the building's verticality, and relating the shape of the building to its specific purpose. All this was revolutionary, appealingly honest, and commercially successful.

Louis Sullivan coined the phrase "form ever follows function," which, shortened to "form follows function," would become the great battle-cry of modernist architects. This credo, which placed the demands of practical use above aesthetics, would later be taken by influential designers to imply that decorative elements, which architects call "ornament," were superfluous in modern buildings. But Sullivan himself neither thought nor designed along such dogmatic lines during the peak of his career. Indeed, while his buildings could be spare and crisp in their principal masses, he often punctuated their plain surfaces with eruptions of lush Art Nouveau and something like Celtic Revival decorations, usually cast in iron or terra cotta, and ranging from organic forms like vines and ivy, to more geometric designs, and interlace, inspired by his Irish design heritage. Terra cotta is lighter and easier to work with than stone masonry. Sullivan used it in his architecture because it had a malleability that was appropriate for his ornament. Probably the most famous example is the writhing green ironwork that covers the entrance canopies of the Carson Pirie Scott store on South State Street. These ornaments, often executed by the talented younger draftsman in Sullivan's employ, would eventually become Sullivan's trademark; to students of architecture, they are his instantly-recognizable signature.

Another signature element of Sullivan's work is the massive, semi-circular arch. Sullivan employed such arches throughout his career - in shaping entrances, in framing windows, or as interior design.

All of these elements can be found in Sullivan's widely-admired Guaranty Building, which he designed while partnered with Adler. Completed in 1895, this office building in Buffalo, New York was visibly divided into three "zones" of design: a plain, wide-windowed base for the ground-level shops; the main office block, with vertical ribbons of masonry rising unimpeded across nine upper floors to emphasize the building's height; and an ornamented cornice perforated by round windows at the roof level, where the building's mechanical units (like the elevator motors) were housed. The cornice crawls with Sullivan's trademark Art Nouveau vines; each ground-floor entrance is topped by a semi-circular arch.

Because of Sullivan's remarkable accomplishments in design and construction at such a critical point in architectural history, he has sometimes been described as the "father" of the American skyscraper. In truth, many architects had been building skyscrapers before or simultaneously with Sullivan. Chicago itself was replete with extraordinary designers and builders in the late years of the 19th century, including Sullivan's partner Dankmar Adler, as well as Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root. Root was one of the builders of the Monadnock Building (see above). That and another Root design, the Masonic Temple Tower (both in Chicago), are cited by many as the originators of skyscraper aesthetics of bearing wall and column-frame construction respectively.

It may be that Sullivan's prominence in skyscraper history can be credited not only to his brilliance, but in some degree to the myth-making skills of his disciple, Frank Lloyd Wright, and to the impact of Sullivan's own book, The Autobiography of an Idea. He may also owe some of his legend to the tragic tint of his later years, which lend this great innovator's story a poignancy which has captured the imagination of student and historian alike.

Later career and decline

In 1890 Sullivan was one of the ten architects, five from the Eastern U.S. and five from the Western U.S., chosen to build a major structure for the "White City", the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. Sullivan's massive Transportation Building and huge arched "Golden Door" stood out as the only forward-looking design in a sea of Beaux-Arts historical copies, and the only gorgeously multicolored facade in the White City. Sullivan and fair director Daniel Burnham were vocal about their displeasure with each other. Sullivan was later (1922) to claim that the fair set the course of American architecture back "for half a century from its date, if not longer." (Autobiography of an Idea, p. 325) His was the only building to receive extensive recognition outside America, receiving three medals from the Union Centrale des Arts Decoratifs the following year.

Like all American architects, Adler and Sullivan saw a precipitous decline in their practice with the onset of the Panic of 1893. According to Charles Bebb, who was working in the office at that time, Adler borrowed money to try to keep employees on the payroll.[3] By 1894, however, in the face of continuing financial distress with no relief in sight, Adler and Sullivan dissolved their partnership. The Guaranty Building was considered the last major project of the firm.

By both temperament and connections, Adler had always been the one who brought in new business to the partnership, and after the rupture Sullivan received few large commissions after the Carson Pirie Scott Department Store. He went into a twenty-year-long financial and emotional decline, beset by a shortage of commissions, chronic financial problems and alcoholism. He obtained a few commissions for small-town Midwestern banks (see below), wrote books, and in 1922 appeared as a critic of Raymond Hood's winning entry for the Tribune Tower competition, a steel-frame tower dressed in Gothic stonework that Sullivan found a shameful piece of historicism. He and his former understudy Frank Lloyd Wright reconciled in time for Wright to help fund Sullivan's funeral after he died, poor and alone, in a Chicago hotel room on April 14, 1924. He left a wife and four children. A modest headstone marks his final resting spot in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood. Only yards away from his resting-place, some of Chicago's lesser-known but much wealthier dead are entombed in handsome and distinctive tombs designed by Sullivan himself. A monument (shown) was later erected in Sullivan's honor, a few feet from his headstone.

Sullivan's legacy is contradictory. Some consider him the first modernist. His forward-looking designs clearly anticipate some issues and solutions of Modernism. However, his embrace of ornament makes his contribution distinct from the Modern Movement that coalesced in the 1920s and became known as the "International Style." To experience Sullivan's built work is to experience the irresistible appeal of his incredible designs, the vertical bands on the Wainwright Building, the burst of welcoming Art Nouveau ironwork on the corner entrance of the Carson Pirie Scott store, the (lost) terra cotta griffins and porthole windows on the Union Trust building, the white angels of the Bayard Building. Except for some designs by his long time draftsman George Grant Elmslie, and the occasional tribute to Sullivan such as Schmidt, Garden & Martin's First National Bank in Pueblo, Colorado (built across the street from Adler and Sullivan's Pueblo Opera House), his style is unique. A visit to the preserved Chicago Stock Exchange trading floor, now at The Art Institute of Chicago, is proof of the immediate and visceral power of the ornament that he used so selectively. Original drawings and other archival materials from Sullivan are held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries in the Art Institute of Chicago and by the Drawings and Archives Department in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. Fragments of Sullivan buildings are also held in many fine art and design museums around the world.

Preservation

During the postwar era of urban renewal, Sullivan's works fell into disfavor, and many were demolished. In the 70's growing public concern for these buildings finally resulted in many being saved. The most vocal voice was Richard Nickel, who even held one-man protests of demolitions. Nickel and others sometimes rescued decorative elements from condemned buildings, sneaking in during demolition. This practice led to Nickel's death inside Sullivan's Stock Exchange building, when a floor above him collapsed.

Buildings through 1895 are by Adler & Sullivan.

Martin Ryerson Tomb, Graceland Cemetery, Chicago (1887)
Auditorium Building, Chicago (1889)
Carrie Eliza Getty Tomb, Graceland Cemetery, Chicago (1890)
Wainwright Building, St. Louis (1890)
Charlotte Dickson Wainwright Tomb, Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis (1892)
Wainwright TombUnion Trust Building (now 705 Olive), St. Louis (1893; street-level ornament heavily altered 1924)
Guaranty Building (formerly Prudential Building), Buffalo (1894)
Bayard Building, (now Bayard-Condict Building), 65–69 Bleecker Street, New York City (1898). Sullivan's only building in New York, with a glazed terra cotta curtain wall expressing the steel structure behind it.
Carson Pirie Scott store, Chicago (1899)
Van Allen Building, Clinton, Iowa (1914)
St Paul's Methodist Church, Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Krause Music Store, Chicago (final commission 1922)

Friday, June 26, 2009

Michael Joseph Jackson....August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009



Satu dunia hari dikejutkan dengan kematian Raja Pop Micheal Jackson. Lagenda ini akan terus diingati sampai bila bila.

Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009 was an American recording artist and entertainer. The seventh child of the Jackson family, he debuted on the professional music scene at the age of 11 as a member of The Jackson 5and began a solo career in 1971 while still a member of the group. Referred to as the "King of Pop" in subsequent years, four of his solo studio albums are among the world's best-selling records: Off the Wall (1979), Bad (1987), Dangerous (1991) and HIStory (1995), while his 1982 Thriller is the world's best-selling record of all time.

In the early 1980s, he became a dominant figure in popular music and the first African-American entertainer to amass a strong crossover following on MTV. The popularity of his music videos airing on MTV, such as "Beat It", "Billie Jean" and Thriller—credited for transforming the music video into an art form and a promotional tool—helped bring the relatively new channel to fame. Videos such as "Black or White" and "Scream" made Jackson an enduring staple on MTV in the 1990s. With stage performances and music videos, Jackson popularized a number of physically complicated dance techniques, such as the robot and the moonwalk. His distinctive musical sound and vocal style influenced many hip hop, pop and contemporary R&B artists.

One of the few artists to have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, his other achievements include multiple Guinness World Records—including one for "Most Successful Entertainer of All Time"—13 Grammy Awards, 13 number one singles in his solo career—more than any other male artist in the Hot 100 era. Jackson's highly publicized personal life, coupled with his successful career, made him a part of popular culture for almost four decades. Michael Jackson died of a suspected cardiac arrest or heart attack, although the cause of dead is still unknown, on June 25, 2009, aged 50.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Influenza A (H1N1) Virus

Artikel kali ini yang hendak di tulis adalah berkaitan dengan jangkitan selsema babi atau Influenza A (H1N1) yang telah merebak hingga ke serata dunia dengan cepatnya.

Terbaru apa yang kita telah dengar dan baca di surat khabar dimana beberapa sekolah di negera kita juga telah ditutup akibat wabak penyakit ini. Merebaknya wabak penyakit ini masih berterusan dan tiada vaksin lagi yang boleh memberi jawapan kepada virus ini.



Bila aku melihat berita-berita yang dipaparkan di dada surat khabar aku mula terkenangkan sebuah filem yang telah di tayangkan pada tahun 2007. Aku rasa semua orang pun tahu tentang cerita ini iaitu "I Am Legend".

I Am Legend

Jika anda semua teliti balik sewaktu ditayangkan cerita ini pada tahun 2007, cerita ini yang dibintangi oleh Will Smith ini adalah berkisarkan pada tahun 2009 dan wabak penyakit itu berkahir pada 2012. Jadi persoalannya adalah adakah cerita ini atau orang orang barat memang sudah mengetahui akan terjadinya wabak seperti ini akan berlaku? ermmmmmm. pikir pikirkan. Sebab sebelum ini juga banyak filem seperti WTC pernah di tayangkan dan akhirnya malapetaka itu benar-benar belaku. Untuk mengingati semula sipnopsis filem I Am Legend ini anda semua boleh la baca di bawah ini semula.

Pikir-pikirkan!!!!!!!

The film is set in 2009-2012. It opens in the fall of 2009 with a television news broadcast featuring Doctor Alice Krippin (Emma Thompson), who claims that she has created a cure for cancer with a 100% success rate. Dr. Krippin says that the cure was created by altering the measles virus.

In September 2012, U.S. Army virologist, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neville (Will Smith) is left as the last healthy human in New York City and possibly the entire world. A series of flashbacks and recorded news broadcasts reveal that the genetically re-engineered measles virus (referred to as K.V. or Krippin virus) mutated into a lethal airborne strain that spread worldwide and killed 5.4 billion people, (90% of humanity). Of the 600 million survivors, only 12 million people possessed a natural immunity to the virus. The rest degenerated into primal, aggressive beings referred to as "Darkseekers" (the DVD subtitles refer to them as hemocytes), who have a painful intolerance to UV radiation. This forces them to hide in buildings and dark places during the day. The "Darkseekers" exhibit increased speed, agility, and strength. Despite their primal behaviour, the Darkseekers seem to retain some basic problem-solving intelligence, animalistic cunning and the capacity to organise themselves. The remaining immune humans were killed by the infected. Flashbacks reveal that his wife Zoe (Salli Richardson) and daughter Marley (Willow Smith) died in a helicopter accident during the chaotic evacuation of Manhattan, prior to the military-enforced quarantine of the island in December 2009.

Neville's daily routine includes experimentation on captive rats to find a cure for the virus, and trips through an empty Manhattan to collect supplies from abandoned homes. He also waits each day for a response to his continuous recorded AM radio broadcasts, which instruct any uninfected survivors to meet him at noon at the South Street Seaport. Neville's isolation is broken only by the companionship of his German Shepherd dog Samantha ("Sam"), interaction with mannequins he has set up as patrons of a video store, and recordings of old television broadcasts.

When one of his experiments on rats shows a promising treatment, Neville sets a snare trap and captures an infected woman. Back in his laboratory, located in the basement of his heavily fortified Washington Square Park home, Neville attempts to treat the infected woman, without success. Later, after finding one of his mannequins in front of Grand Central Station, he is himself caught in a trap and passes out. When Neville finally gets free, it is dusk, and he is attacked by a pack of infected dogs. Although Neville and Sam manage to kill the dogs, one of the infected dogs bites Sam (although dogs are unaffected by the airborne strain of the Krippin virus, they are still affected by the contact strain). Neville takes the wounded Sam back to his lab and attempted to cure her with the experimental treatment. However, he is forced to kill her.

Later that night, after burying Sam in a cornfield, and overcome by grief and rage, he attacks a group of the infected. Despite killing a large number of Darkseekers, the infected overwhelm Neville and nearly kill him, but he is rescued by a pair of immune survivors, Anna (Alice Braga) and a young boy named Ethan (Charlie Tahan), who have heard his AM broadcasts. They take the injured Neville back to his home, where Anna explains that they are making their way to a putative survivors' camp in Bethel, Vermont. When Anna claims that their meeting wasn't coincidence, but part of God's plan, Neville argues that in the wake of devastation left by the Krippin virus, there can be no God.

Suddenly, the Alpha Male leads a group of infected in an attack on the house, having followed Anna and Neville back the night before. The Darkseekers force Neville, Anna, and Ethan to retreat into the basement laboratory. They seal themselves in a room with the infected woman, where they discover that Neville's treatment is working: the subject has reverted to a human form. The infected are managing to break through the acrylic glass seperating them, at which point Neville remembers his daughter mentioning a butterfly the night she died, and her voice rings through his mind. Neville knows now what he must do. Neville takes a sample of the infected female's blood and gives a vial of it to Anna. He pushes Anna and Ethan into an old coal chute and shuts them inside. He then sacrifices himself to save their lives, using an M67 hand grenade to kill the infected.

Anna and Ethan escape to Vermont and locate the survivors' colony, where Anna hands over the cure. Before the credits roll, the ending scene in the movie depicts the survivors colony from a birds eye view. The scene is provided with a voice over with Anna implying that the survivors are Neville's legacy, as Neville became a legend for finding a cure.

Alternate ending

The tone of the film's ending was altered before the film's release, especially the stand-off between Neville and the infected in his laboratory. Visual effects supervisor Janek Sirrs recounts the original ending starting with the stand-off: "At that point, Neville's—and the audience's—assumptions about the nature of these creatures are shown to be incorrect. We see that they have actually retained some of their humanity. There is a very important moment between the Alpha Male and Neville. The Alpha Male slapped his hand on the glass and smeared it revealing a butterfly shaped imprint." Neville realizes that the Alpha Male is identifying the infected woman he was experimenting on by a butterfly tattoo, and that the Alpha Male wants her back. Demonstrating that he will cease fighting and return her, Neville is allowed to approach them, with the Alpha Male ordering the infected not to touch him. Neville brings the Alpha Female back to consciousness, still infected, due to him having removed the cure, and the Alpha Male embraces her; David Schaub stated, "Then, when Neville finally turns the Alpha Female over to the Alpha Male, there is this little love moment between the two of them." Neville and the Alpha Male then exchange stares; Neville apologizes to them, which the Alpha Male acknowledges before the infected leave. He then looks at the photos of the infected he has experimented on and killed, and he realizes that he is the monster of their legends: the infected think of him as someone who hunts down and kills their people. The original final shot follows Neville, Anna, and Ethan as they cross the remnants of the George Washington Bridge in hopes of finding other survivors, accompanied by a recording from Anna telling possible survivors that there is hope, and Neville knows the compounds of the cure, meaning he can recreate it and help humanity survive and rebuild, thus establishing his legend.


p/s : selamat menonton Transformers : Revenge Of The Fallen

Monday, June 15, 2009

International Style

International Style is a term often used to describe Bauhaus architecture in the United States. The name came from the book The International Style by historian and critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock and architect Philip Johnson. The book was published in 1932 in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The term is again used in a later book, International Architecture, by Walter Gropius.

While German Bauhaus architecture had been concerned with the social aspects of design, America's International Style became a symbolism of Capitalism: The International Style is the favored architecture for office buildings, and is also found in upscale homes built for the rich.

One of the most famous examples of the International Style is the United Nations Secretariat building, designed by the Bauhaus architect Le Corbusier. The smooth glass-sided slab dominates New York's skyline along the East River. The United Nations Secretariat building was completed in 1952.

Le Corbusier's United Nations Secretariat building over-looks the New York City skyline along the East River.