Esoteric Survey

  I took a trip up to the Bay Area this weekend. Aalto stools are always great to get. Especially when they're early I had to stop in Ventura on the way up so I took the coast the whole way. I checked online to see if there were any estate sales on the route. There happened to be a good looking one near Pismo Beach. I really wasn't interested in any of the furniture but where there's smoke.  I arrived a couple hours after the sale started, which is when I usually like to go to avoid all the drama. There were a ton of books and they were $5 each. A handful of the usual Amazon book scanners were there with big stacks set aside. If you don't know how these work, they often use handheld or even finger mounted scanners to look up book values by the ISBN or bar codes. If it's worth a certain amount, it turns green and/or beeps if they should buy it. The great thing about them is that the people using them usually have no clue about what to buy outside of what their scanne...

  The Imperial Hotel (1923-1968) by Frank Lloyd Wright was located in Tokyo. It was the second building by Wright at the Imperial Hotel site.  The first was a temporary annex he designed when the original hotel annex burned down. In 1913, after a couple years of correspondence with the hotel's owner, Aisaku Hayashi, Wright was asked to design and build a new larger structure to replace the main hotel. Construction started in 1919.  As you might recall from a  previous post , Antonin and Noémi Raymond worked on the project. Antonin was the project architect, and Noémi worked on decorative art design elements. Koichi Kitazawa and Kyosuke Matono were also architects working on the project under Antonin.  Rendering from 1923  Image:  Old Tokyo The new hotel, seen here, opened in 1923. By the 1960's the hotel was in disrepair. Most notably was the deterioration of the carved oya stone Wright used for the Maya revival elements. In 1968, despite attempts...