26 April 2011

OT: Apple, Google collect user location data

To be filed under "Dept. of Defenseless Consumer":

With modern smartphones, we are all equal; how lovely. Because not only Apple, but also Google collects user data.


When the news about Apple's collection lust broke last week I didn't believe they were the only ones. But here's the confirmation from the WSJ on Android phone data collection. Scary.

In the meantime, gizmodo.com has updated their first piece on the subject and added a nice handy chart in a second article explaining who does what with your location data.

Photo ©gizmodo


As Mattch Buchanan on gizmodo writes "There's no opting out, there's no knowledge, there's just creepiness."

Now, you must excuse me while I'm rummaging through the attic for my old Nokia 6100 classic.

15 April 2011

The Florida Modern Homes Market in March

Interested in market data for modern homes?

I just published today the March data for modern single family homes at http://www.modernsouthflorida.com/current-market-data.html

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

04 April 2011

Three Modern Home Demolition-Alerts in NC

Headed for destruction unless quickly purchased, you can buy one of these three livable works of art and keep them from doom.


ALERT 1: Are you the ultimate tinkerer? Good with tools? Want a house for $14,000? The Collins Street Lustron in Nashville NC, less than an hour from Raleigh, is owned by the church next door which needs a new parking lot. 


This classic 1950’s prefab house will be carted off to the dump within two weeks unless you act now.  The demolition contractor hired recently by the church, Lane Johnson, has become a big Lustron fan and has offered a short “stay of execution.”  Lane will painstakingly disassemble the modular Lustron (like an erector set) and put it on a truck for $14,000. 

That’s an entire house, delivered to you, for the cost of a car. He’ll even get you the assembly manual. Bring this bad boy to your backyard! For more information, contact Tobias please.




ALERT 2: It takes a special kind of person to design and build their own home from scratch, and Raleigh city planner John Voorhees did just that in 1961.  


2727 North Mayview is wildly central inside Raleigh, just off Brooks Avenue. You could not get a better location. 

The owners have put the property on the market as a lotwhich means certain death for this unique Modernist home. No doubt about it, the house needs some work, but can be saved by the right person. $269,900. For more information, contact Tobias please. 



ALERT 3: As reported earlier, News 14 Carolina picked up TMH's national preservation alert for A.G. Odell’s Lassiter House in Charlotte, NC. 

Steel beams support the roof and eliminate the need for load-bearing interior walls, thereby enabling large open spaces to predominate throughout the interior. 


A particularly ingenious scheme was an arrangement whereby the dining table could be set in the kitchen, complete with food and adornments, and slid through the wall into the dining room.  Appeared in Better Homes and Gardens September 1956. Charles McMurray did an addition in the 1970's. Included a saltwater pool at one point. In need of major renovations.

Unless sold, this unique modernist house 
will be demolished in June. 3 BR, 2.5 baths, $785,000. Watch the video, and contact Tobias for more information please.
____

01 April 2011

Masters of Modern Architecture and their Dogs


Most lovers of modern architecture–given sufficient funds–have a very pronounced taste in design. They do not live in a modernist home by accident, but by careful choice.

They may have spent quite a few hours on the web, and even more with some poor Realtor who didn’t know Mashimoto from Matsushita, only to utter to the right house what Paul McCartney said to Linda when he saw her the first time: “Where have you been?”

So if the structure is asthetically appealing and visually pleasing, one wants the items that enliven the space to be as congruent with the architecture and perhaps even the architect’s vision as possible. It can’t and doesn’t end with furnishings, door handles, silverware and the dust collectors. Understandable then that creators of modern architecture are even more specific, including in their choice of pets. 

But what was previously unknown is that many of the modernist masters – including James Walter Fitzgibbon, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, I.M. Pei, Pierre Koenig, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier  – were united in their love for one specific dog breed: the Scottish Terrier. 

However, if you look at the similarities between design elements of modern architecture and Scotties, the parallels are obvious, the match is clear. Recently discovered photographs, many of them taken by the architects themselves, are proof:


Fitzgibbon, Paschal residence, Raleigh, NC
Mies, Farnsworth residence, Plano, IL
Mies, Kandinsky residence, Dessau, Germany
Koenig, Stahl residence, Los Angeles, CA
Le Corbusier with friends, believed to be NY at the UN, ca. 1951
Breuer, Breuer residence, Lincoln, MA
Wright, Kaufman residence "Fallingwater", near Mill Run, PA. Terrier on left under cantilever
Pei, Newhouse school, Syracuse U, Syracuse, NY
Gropius in his office, undated

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the weekend as well as the First of April. 

Photos © by TMH, suttonhoo, Stadt Dessau, meatiesmyrtle, unknown, Matthews, lipingzeng, Jordan, unknown.