- Social:
Chicago Tribune
Blair Kamin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune.
PROFILE
Blair Kamin
Guest
FROM Blair Kamin
Design and Architecture
Saving Louis Kahn's floating concert ship A floating masterpiece is sending out an SOS. A concert hall on a barge designed by Louis Kahn may wind up in a Louisiana scrapyard if a buyer does not come forward with $2 million. "Point Counterpoint II" was commissioned by Robert Boudreau shortly before Kahn's death in 1974. SInce 1976, Boudreau has been taking orchestras to perform small towns on waterways throughout America. Now, at 90, he wants to sell what he calls "the last of the showboats." Cellist Yo-Yo Ma sounded the alarm in a letter to the New York Review of Books. Now one town has expressed interest in buying it: Kingston, New York. It's in the Hudson River Valley, near Woodstock, and city officials dream of docking the barge at a former brick factory on the river that's been converted into an events space. They are looking for an angel to help foot the bill.
Recommended
Bookworm
George Saunders: Lincoln in the Bardo (Part I) Lincoln in the Bardo dramatizes a grieving President Lincoln as he visits the grave of his beloved son Willie, who died at age eleven. In the novel, the buried dead believe they're not dead -- "they're sick and refer to their coffins as "sick boxes."
Bookworm
Claudio Magris: Blameless In Claudio Magris' Blameless, a museum of the implements of war and destruction is created to inspire peace. But this conversation is not just about war and peace.
Bookworm
Morgan Parker: There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé Morgan Parker says that the poems in her book There Are Things More Beautiful than Beyoncé take a stand against the clichés of the dominant culture.
Design and Architecture
Farewell LA freeways, Peter Shire is back Angelenos don't want more freeways but we seem not to want mass transit either. Metro has killed the 710 freeway extension, and bus and train ridership is down across the region. What's the future of getting around in LA? And, Peter Shire is having a comeback. What attracts a new generation to his playful ceramics and furniture?