Funny, though where've you been all these years, sport? If I see one more person in Chuck Taylors, I'm gonna puke on them -- whether the person or the shoes, I haven't decided, yet.
What else am I thinking about right now? My cynical story, yes, yes. I'm going to start on it tonight, while I finish my beer.
I'm trying only to post one picture per four-entry cluster, but it's hard. I want to post more pictures, but I'm really trying to restrain myself, for the sake of the foolish little rules I've set up for myself on this blog, which I haven't really ironed out, but kind of know intuitively.
How much car exhaust have I inhaled today? My lungs are probably full of glass. I remember seeing pictures of smog, based on regions, and city-smog was kinda scary on a microscopic level. Tiny bits of metal and glass and dirt and other nasty stuff -- I think living in the city is the equivalent of smoking X number of cigarettes a day. Nasty.
Art is expensive. I always think up projects, even middling ones, not huge, grandiose things, and they invariably end up too expensive. I've tried to get around it, like culling stuff from thrift stores or found objects, but it still ends up more costly than I'd like -- champagne dreams on a beer budget! I usually just jot the ideas down in one of my notebooks for later implementation, once I get enough money together. Then again, art is where you find it. That's why I'm totally hooked on my little digital camera -- instant fix.
Check this out...
Jumbo architecture turns jet into dream home
Fri Apr 21, 2:39 AM ET
A wealthy California woman is to turn a Boeing 747 jet into a house on some of the most exclusive real estate in the world.
Francie Rehwald wanted a house that was environmentally friendly and "feminine". Architect David Hertz, a specialist in using recycled materials, said she was stunned when he recommended an old 747, the biggest commercial aircraft in service.
The jumbo jet cost about 40,000 dollars from a cemetery for more than 1,500 scrap airliners in the California desert.
The jet is to be moved in parts to a 55-acre (22-hectare) site in the Malibu Hills near the Pacific Ocean and Rehwald admits the final cost will be several million dollars.
The wings will be the main house. The cockpit will become a meditation temple, the jet's trademark hump will become a loft and the remaining scrap will be used for more buildings.
"The whole idea stated very seriously, about a beautiful, sublime architectural piece. It's not just living in an airplane," said Hertz, who runs a design firm in Santa Monica, near Los Angeles.
"The client just asked me to create something that was curvy, linear and feminine," he added, noting the site had a beautiful view toward a mountain range.
"To build -- that would have been very expensive, so I started to think: 'Well, there is something that does that much better, that's a wing,' and then we started to superpose different aircraft wings on the site to find the best size and shape."
"When you look at them, they are very curvy, very soft, and very feminine and thin."
Finding an old version of the 230-foot-long (70-metre-) jet was easy in California because of the desert scrapyard.
Rehwald, whose family set up the first Mercedes-Benz concession in California, bought the 28th of the approximately 1,430 Boeing 747s built up to now. It was delivered in 1970 to TWA and finished its flying time with Tower Air 30 years later.
The architect needs permission from 17 government agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), for the project, which still needs final planning permission.
Hertz hopes construction will start in June.
The jet will be cut up and taken in parts by road to the Malibu Hills and then taken by helicopter to the site. "It is thrilling to imagine this wing becoming a roof," said Rehwald.
The roof, however, will have to be registered with the FAA and a red cross painted on it so that planes flying over do not mistake the house for a crashed jet.
The house will incorporate many state-of-the-art energy saving devices, including special air conditioning and a rain-collection system.
"This projects embodies a lot of a philosophies in architecture I've been interested in for many, many years," said Hertz.
"It deals with prefabrication, recycled content.
"Think about the airplane as a giant aluminium can. It's 100 percent recyclable product. It represents an abandoned infrastructure unutilized, billions of dollars of research and development that went into the plane, a 200-million dollar airplane, that you can buy for 40,000 dollars."
$40K for a 747 body? Far out. Guess the shipping and handling would be a bitch, though.
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