This week at the Archive | 2 January 2012

In the Suburbs (1957)

A look at suburbia sponsored by Redbook:

Here is a priceless view of the socio-economic conditions which led to what we now have to live with.

— recommended by David Cox

http://www.archive.org/details/IntheSub1957

Eiffel Tower

You probably know what the Eiffel Tower looks like; here’s what it sounds like. Since 1889, the world has assumed they knew the famous Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. Artist China Blue has proven them wrong. In October of 2007, China Blue, along with her technical team headed by auditory neuroscientist Seth Horowitz, discovered that it is a living, constantly fluxing iron organism: a living thing with its own song, derived from the structural vibrations as it responds to its environment. The Tower produces a pulsing range of sounds, from the subsonic vibrations of the iron born from footsteps, motors and the wind, to the hum of the steel chariots in the machine room, to the human voices that surround her.

http://www.archive.org/details/EiffelTower

— recommended by Alain Bresson

Modern Hardware for Your Home (ca. 1925)

You may think your home is full of modern technology, and it is. But “modern” is relative; here’s what a modern home might have had almost ninety years ago.

http://www.archive.org/details/ModernHardwareForYourHome

— recommended by Sarah Burke

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—David Glenn Rinehart