It put an end to funding nonsense like this:
A typical apartment has three or four rooms in the shapes of either a cylinder, a cube, or a sphere. Rooms surround a kitchen-living room combination with bumpy, undulating floors and floor-to-ceiling ladders and poles. Dozens of colors, from school-bus yellow to sky blue, cover the walls, ceilings and other surfaces.
At least one tenant says he feels a little younger already. Nobutaka Yamaoka, who moved in with his wife and two children about two years ago, says he has lost more than 20 pounds and no longer suffers from hay fever, though he isn’t sure whether it was cured by the loft.
There is no closet, and Mr. Yamaoka can’t buy furniture for the living room or kitchen because the floor is too uneven, but he relishes the lifestyle. “I feel a completely different kind of comfort here,” says the 43-year-old video director. His wife, however, complains that the apartment is too cold. Also, the window to the balcony is near the floor, and she keeps bumping her head against the frame when she crawls out to hang up laundry, he says. (“That’s one of the exercises,” says Ms. Gins.)
“A different kind of comfort.” Yes, I suppose that’s one way to put it. But there’s a fly in the ointment:
Some transhumanists dismiss the couple’s architectural solution.
You don’t say.
“Human life has enough challenges in terms of our work and daily lives that we don’t need to invent new physical challenges for our bodies,” says Ray Kurzweil, a leading transhumanist figure in the U.S.
Well, the good news is that Madoff’s (and their) loss is our gain.
Hmm, actually, Madoff very efficiently siphoned off the wealth of these crazies and redistributed it to wherever he spent the money — probably to sensible working people like maids, waiters, car salesmen, whores, fur and diamond merchants.
That’s the nice thing about a free market. It prevents exactly the sort of absurd accumulation of unearned wealtb by connected or lucky people about which (ironically) the proponents of non-free economies rail.
From the article: The pair’s work, based loosely on a movement known as “transhumanism,” is premised on the idea that people degenerate and die in part because they live in spaces that are too comfortable. The artists’ solution: construct abodes that leave people disoriented, challenged and feeling anything but comfortable.
No doubt they’ll soon get a government grant to mass produce their design for Obamavilles around the country. People have been too comfortable for too long.
I think it looks neat. It’s like living in a playground.
FWIW, I think the idea of doing small, regular exercises (stretching, climbing, squatting, etc.) to extend like is supported by the medical literature. You can read more about it here.
Who the hell would want to live in a playground? That makes no sense. And you can do “small, regular exercises” in a comfortable room — you don’t need to shoehorn yourself into some Rube Goldberg contraption just to stretch or squat. As a matter of fact, I took out a bag of trash yesterday and gathering it all together took a bit of stretching (to open the dumpster chute), climbing (up the stairs to the dumpster chute) and squatting (to pick up the wastebaskets and dump them into the trashbag). And I just live in a 500 sq ft studio apartment.
And having read the article, the places described don’t sound like fun, they sound like deliberate efforts to destroy normality. They and the wacky “artists” who designed them remind me of none other than a character in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead: the avant-garde writer woman who commissioned the sell-out architect to design an ugly, uncomfortable house (I don’t have the book anymore, all I remember is black interior walls and no windows) in order to contribute to the destruction of human excellence.
From the article:
“Their research is a milestone in the history of conceptual art,” says Alexandra Munroe, senior curator at the main Guggenheim Museum
There is anything so stupid and moronic and self-destructive that you can’t find over-educated intellectuals willing to gush over it?
… they played a role in the conceptual art movement, based on the philosophy that the artist’s idea or concept behind a piece of art is more important than the physical object itself.
Madoff practiced a form of finance where the idea of investing wisely was more important than the act of doing so. I suppose the could regard all their lost wealth as part of a performance piece.
Awesome, a human sized gerbil cage.
Once I looked at the image gallery, my first thought, “they could never sell this in California, as it is not accessible to the disabled.” My second thought was “this looks like a strip club.”