A House Finds a New Home The New York Times

Table Of Content

• Space laser transmission strikes Earth from 140 million miles away: NASA
• This Quiz Will Tell You Which US State You Should Live In, And Exactly What Your Dream House Looks Like
• New York City
• Barbie’s Bachelorette Pad
• La Monte Young’s Tribeca art space, Dream House, enters its 30th season
• In New York, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s permanent sound and light installation continue to amaze its visitors
• Charles Curtis: Live Concert Performance

From the beginning, much of Barbie’s existence — her unrealistic physical proportions, the lack of racially diverse dolls, the toy’s reinforcing of gender roles — has been debated in jest and in seriousness. But her home, which has not been as publicly parsed or praised like the doll, has been a mirror for the various social, political and economic changes the rest of the country was experiencing. It has followed housing patterns and trends, from chic, compact urban living to suburban sprawl to pure excess. At times, it has been out of step, ignoring the country’s ills (Barbie’s never been broke; she has never lost her house to foreclosure). A select group of the maison’s artisans — including a fine arts painter and a specialist in malletage (the crisscrossed padded lining of the trunks) — will be present on different dates to demonstrate their techniques. They will also meet one-on-one with clients who wish to personalize their goods or commission bespoke pieces.

Space laser transmission strikes Earth from 140 million miles away: NASA

Couple finds dream home on Long Island with help from HGTV's 'House Hunters' - Newsday

Couple finds dream home on Long Island with help from HGTV's 'House Hunters'.

Posted: Mon, 25 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

When St. Francis moved to Remsen Street in the 1960s, they kept one of these buildings. Continuing pressure for commercial space here, combined with new popular residential locations farther out in what was now a borough of New York City, tipped the block to almost wholly commercial over the course of a few decades. When Pierrepont died in 1838, his children inherited wide swaths of the family’s Brooklyn Heights land.

This Quiz Will Tell You Which US State You Should Live In, And Exactly What Your Dream House Looks Like

Unlike zoning which can be adopted or rescinded by a legislative body, private covenants are “very, very hard” to remove, he said. Pierrepont and his heirs’ restrictions were largely intended to establish residential living. Not much more than a generation after the original developers had enforced their intended vision of neighborhood character, Brooklyn boomed. The signs, which can be found on street posts throughout Brooklyn Heights, celebrate Pierrepont, “a transplanted New Englander,” as important to the history of the neighborhood. Bill Bosch at Pillsbury, a lawyer for Rockrose, told the court that Alexico knew about the eight-foot setback restriction even before signing the purchase agreement with St. Francis College. Society has held up “this promise of homeownership as part and parcel of the American dream,” for centuries, said Ms. Castro.

New York City

Most of the people who enter the space, about 10 in all, seem to intuitively orient themselves towards the blue lights. "Dream House" has essentially remained the same for the last 23 years. But through October 8th, the space is hosting a rare temporary exhibition, an installation called "Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest X" by an artist and longtime mentee of Young and Zazeela's, Jung Hee Choi. Choi is perhaps Young and Zazeela's most committed student and an heir to their minimalist legacy. For the exhibition, Choi filled the space with strange visuals -- a video of swirling blue dots, a projection that looks like dancing smoke -- and wrote an accompanying sound piece based on an algebraic sum of sound frequencies (Choi calls them her "Tonecycles"). It's heady stuff, but the immersive sounds, smells, and light of the mystical-feeling space make it easy to forget the technical complexities.

Dia Chelsea

Downtown Brooklyn’s retail, commercial and financial hub exploded, right at the doorstep of Remsen Street. When you see this row of townhouses, all in a line set back from the street, the front courtyard is not just for aesthetics — it’s often required. Other Brooklyn Heights developers followed the Pierrepont family’s lead by establishing restrictive covenants on their land sales, too. Henry led his fellow heirs in establishing restrictive covenants for all of their inherited property. Pierrepont expanded on the period’s customary land use restrictions by also adding required types, materials, and sizes for buildings, and lot geometry minimums — concepts which are familiar from today’s zoning. Specifically, it’s the part of the sidewalk to the right of the person in the brown coat.

Barbie’s Bachelorette Pad

On one visit, I met a jazz player who comes nightly to the Dream House after work. On another late night occasion I saw couples visiting after their dinner dates. The Dream House is many things to many people, but for all it provides a moment of transcendence, transporting all who come to a state of mind far beyond the New York streets. A visit to the Dream House is highly recommended for those who wish to engage the often overlooked sense of hearing.

Turn your head to one side, or bend down, or raise an arm, and the tone will resonate in different ways throughout your body. Young’s student and disciple Jung Hee Choi, who is set to take over the project when the 88-year-old artist dies, adds that the Dream House is distinct from what most people think of as an art installation. Knowing the intimate and long-standing relationship of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela to this work, makes the Dream House an incredibly special experience. Signs of their personal presence in the space are scattered about, and one has the feeling that they are sharing part of their home and part of themselves very generously with the world by keeping the Dream House open and freely accessible.

The space is soft pink, neon purple, and incredibly loud; you hear the music with your body as much as with your ears. Giant speaker cabinets surround the small room, which is lined with wall-to-wall carpeting and has pillows strewn about the floor. Lounging is encouraged, as Young’s work deliberately invites visitors to slow down and experience the present.

Charles Curtis: Live Concert Performance

Young is no stranger to decade-spanning projects focused on single notes and pitches. His landmark 1964 minimalist masterpiece The Well-Tuned Piano is a 50-year work in progress. Partly improvisatory, it’s played on a grand piano that must sit in the performance space for at least three months to become settled into “just intonation.” The work can take up to 6 hours to perform, and Young has revived it multiple times throughout the years. The piece was also an early collaboration with Zazeela, who employed her famed light installation The Magenta Lights.

Though it might’ve been successful marketing, Mattel’s pink dousing would later be criticized for perpetuating gender stereotypes. Mirroring the growing popularity of prefabricated construction, Barbie’s A-frame house was modular — children could deconstruct it by pulling the sections apart. As the 1970s ended, Barbie — and many Americans — gave up the metropolitan lifestyle and moved out to the suburbs with a prototypical A-frame home. To impress men, Ms. Brown instructed women on having a “wall of pictures,” a “sexy kitchen” and plenty of books — features found in Barbie’s townhouse.

But the couple’s ideal version of “Dream House” operated from 1979 to 1985 in an old mercantile exchange building on Harrison Street in TriBeCa, where with the support of the Dia Art Foundation they installed an array of ambitious sound-and-light environments on six floors. His restrictive covenants would block a buyer who couldn’t afford a large house or top-line construction. And the restrictions would block houses from being built right up to the property line — he wouldn’t just tout the appearance of country living through widely spaced houses, he’d lock it into the lot requirements. So how does a nonprofit, donation-based space stay afloat and pay rent in pricey TriBeCa? "Dream House" is run by La Monte Young's MELA Foundation and supported by Dia Art Foundation, among others (the visuals and music that make up Dream House were exhibited by Dia in a different space, in Chelsea, in 2015).

The share that were first-time homeowners was the lowest it’s been since at least 1981. Barbie’s body, careers, lifestyle and house — a hot pink monument of decadence and desire, now equipped with a swimming pool, slide and elevator — have all been qualities designed for children (and adults) to crave for themselves. Barbie has been the platonic ideal of what a young woman could and should be. “Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future,” Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie, told The New York Times in 1977. She named the doll after her own daughter (Ken was named after Ms. Handler’s son). After entering the townhouse, guests make their way up the winding Italian black marble staircase, admiring the jaw-dropping creations elegantly displayed in the many rooms.

These heirs started a decades-long process of divvying up the estate and parceling it out to other local developers and speculators. His restrictions were imposed privately, but in the format of a deed restrictive covenant that has the force of law — closely equivalent to modern, city-imposed restrictions contained in zoning regulations. Pierrepont’s marketing of Brooklyn Heights as one of America’s first suburbs is conventional wisdom, found everywhere from scholarly opinion pieces to the historical markers lining the streets of today’s landmark district. Reports emerged early last year that St. Francis was selling its former campus to the Alexico Group, the developer of Manhattan’s “Jenga” building. Brooklyn Heights is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York City so a sprawling campus is not the sort of property you want to hold onto just for the memories. But her wheelchair didn’t fit in the Dreamhouse elevator, and Barbie couldn’t go to the upper floors of her own home, just like versions of a doll that accompanied her and the Dreamhouse more than two decades earlier.

Jeremy Lechtzin is the president of the Brooklyn Heights Association, an urban data historian and a lawyer. They met when Jeremy helped Aliza plan a tour of Brooklyn Heights to give to the guests at her wedding. Produced by Aliza Aufrichtig, Phaedra Brown, Gabriel Gianordoli and Earl Wilson.

More than 60 years of Barbie’s Dreamhouses have further instilled that in us from a young age. The stark reminders that it’s a fantasyland might put some viewers at ease. Aspects of the Dreamhouses are meant to appear “architecturally implausible” to keep things toylike, said Ms. Spencer. The four Dreamhouses had no walls, and there were also no toilets, no shadows, no color white. They used cheap fake grass — the higher quality fake grass appeared too realistic.