The Call for Submissions link will be available through www.aams.org shortly. The deadline is December 15, 2008.
The 2009 Air Medical Transport Conference will be in October 2009 in San Jose, California see you there!
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Minnesota Timberwolves Preseason Basketball
The Minnesota Timberwolves have a couple of preseason NBA Games while the AMTC is in Minneapolis. Check it out.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Doing Uptown a Big Favor
The Favor Cafe (913 W. Lake St., Minneapolis) is now cooking in the former Restaurant Miami.
The Crockett-and-Tubbs interior remains the same, but the made-from-scratch food is a world apart: catfish po' boys, fried chicken with collard greens, shrimp-crawfish gumbo, fried okra and peach cobbler.
RICK NELSON
The Crockett-and-Tubbs interior remains the same, but the made-from-scratch food is a world apart: catfish po' boys, fried chicken with collard greens, shrimp-crawfish gumbo, fried okra and peach cobbler.
RICK NELSON
Pass the Nutella: Fast-food, French-style, returns to Nicollet Mall
Rick Nelson, Star Tribune
This weekend marks the opening of La Belle Crêpe (825 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, 612-333-1100). Owner Alain Lesse can't wait.
"Every day for the past few weeks, we've had 80 to 100 people a day poke their head in and ask, 'When are you opening?' " he said. "Even the mayor came in."
That's the bonus of doing business at a high-profile location. The slip of a space is just off the glorious lobby of the Medical Arts Building, a few steps from the last crêperie to grace downtown (the former Magic Pan) and fronting the city's busiest pedestrian thoroughfare.
Lesse hopes to capture more attention with a pair of crêpe griddles in the window, where he'll be cooking breakfast, lunch and an unfashionably early weeknight dinner (to 7 p.m.), offering both sweet and savory options: buckwheat crêpes filled with eggs, Gruyère and ham; a lightly sugared flour crêpe filled with berries and crème fraîche; and a design-your-own option taking advantage of a long list of ingredients.
Prices will range from $3.50 (for a classic cream-and-sugar combo) to $8.50 (smoked salmon, asparagus and Havarti). "With today's economy, everyone wants to spend $10 or less," said Lesse. "I'll be giving them affordable fast food." Lesse will also stock Izzy's ice cream as well as popular Italian and French sodas. No seating -- there's no room, given that the space was once home to what seemed to be the World's Smallest Fannie Farmer Store -- but Lesse has added a standing-room-only counter that's roomy enough to fit a dozen eat-and-run diners (that's probably eight or so shy Minnesotans with personal space issues).
Lesse, a native Frenchman who has been in Minnesota for 19 years ("I count them as 19 winters," he said), will be a familiar face to many local diners, with a long tenure as a server in a number of Twin Cities restaurants, including Meritage and the former cafe un deux trois. "I've been around the block," said Lesse with a laugh. "It's time for me to be out on my own."
This weekend marks the opening of La Belle Crêpe (825 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, 612-333-1100). Owner Alain Lesse can't wait.
"Every day for the past few weeks, we've had 80 to 100 people a day poke their head in and ask, 'When are you opening?' " he said. "Even the mayor came in."
That's the bonus of doing business at a high-profile location. The slip of a space is just off the glorious lobby of the Medical Arts Building, a few steps from the last crêperie to grace downtown (the former Magic Pan) and fronting the city's busiest pedestrian thoroughfare.
Lesse hopes to capture more attention with a pair of crêpe griddles in the window, where he'll be cooking breakfast, lunch and an unfashionably early weeknight dinner (to 7 p.m.), offering both sweet and savory options: buckwheat crêpes filled with eggs, Gruyère and ham; a lightly sugared flour crêpe filled with berries and crème fraîche; and a design-your-own option taking advantage of a long list of ingredients.
Prices will range from $3.50 (for a classic cream-and-sugar combo) to $8.50 (smoked salmon, asparagus and Havarti). "With today's economy, everyone wants to spend $10 or less," said Lesse. "I'll be giving them affordable fast food." Lesse will also stock Izzy's ice cream as well as popular Italian and French sodas. No seating -- there's no room, given that the space was once home to what seemed to be the World's Smallest Fannie Farmer Store -- but Lesse has added a standing-room-only counter that's roomy enough to fit a dozen eat-and-run diners (that's probably eight or so shy Minnesotans with personal space issues).
Lesse, a native Frenchman who has been in Minnesota for 19 years ("I count them as 19 winters," he said), will be a familiar face to many local diners, with a long tenure as a server in a number of Twin Cities restaurants, including Meritage and the former cafe un deux trois. "I've been around the block," said Lesse with a laugh. "It's time for me to be out on my own."
Thursday, October 2, 2008
A Chance to Glimpse the Rare State Flower
AIMEE BLANCHETTE, Star Tribune
Did you know that Lady's Slippers are members of the orchid family? Learn more about the state flower during the second annual Lady's Slipper Day, Saturday at the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary in Minneapolis.
"The lady's slipper is a pretty special flower. It's rare, it's an orchid, and it's difficult to grow. They like particular environments," said Lauren Borer, garden program coordinator.
"They really are something to see. The yellow ones are blooming. The state flower, the Showy Lady's Slipper, is a pink-and-white blossom, and it's just that -- showy. It takes your breath away. It's fun to celebrate something that represents our state."
The Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary is celebrating a time of change in the garden with a month-long schedule of programs, tours and activities.
"June is a really great time to come out to the garden, because spring flowers are nearing the end and we're getting more into our summer blooms," Borer said.
The second annual Showy Lady's Slipper Day starts with a discussion on gardening with native orchids and a sale of the orchids from Winsome Orchids. There will be family activities including storytelling and tours. The tours will focus on the garden's own collection of native orchids, including the yellow lady's slipper and the showy lady's slipper.
Lady's Slipper Day will also include a tour of the Quaking Bog, located across the road from the garden. There are wetland plants growing and blooming in this wetland. Some of the plants that grow there are insectivorous, meaning that they feed on insects.
"It's always a treat to visit the bog, and there's a lot to learn from our naturalists," Borer said.
The garden is open seven days a week from 7:30 a.m. to half-an-hour before sunset, and is free to the public.
Did you know that Lady's Slippers are members of the orchid family? Learn more about the state flower during the second annual Lady's Slipper Day, Saturday at the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary in Minneapolis.
"The lady's slipper is a pretty special flower. It's rare, it's an orchid, and it's difficult to grow. They like particular environments," said Lauren Borer, garden program coordinator.
"They really are something to see. The yellow ones are blooming. The state flower, the Showy Lady's Slipper, is a pink-and-white blossom, and it's just that -- showy. It takes your breath away. It's fun to celebrate something that represents our state."
The Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary is celebrating a time of change in the garden with a month-long schedule of programs, tours and activities.
"June is a really great time to come out to the garden, because spring flowers are nearing the end and we're getting more into our summer blooms," Borer said.
The second annual Showy Lady's Slipper Day starts with a discussion on gardening with native orchids and a sale of the orchids from Winsome Orchids. There will be family activities including storytelling and tours. The tours will focus on the garden's own collection of native orchids, including the yellow lady's slipper and the showy lady's slipper.
Lady's Slipper Day will also include a tour of the Quaking Bog, located across the road from the garden. There are wetland plants growing and blooming in this wetland. Some of the plants that grow there are insectivorous, meaning that they feed on insects.
"It's always a treat to visit the bog, and there's a lot to learn from our naturalists," Borer said.
The garden is open seven days a week from 7:30 a.m. to half-an-hour before sunset, and is free to the public.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Monday, September 15, 2008
The Finn who shaped modern America
MARY ABBE, Star Tribune
In the United States throughout the 1950s, it was a Finnish-born architect, Eero Saarinen, who shaped American dreams and ambitions with innovative buildings and imaginative furniture.
For 11 short years, Saarinen was a creative dynamo, spinning out designs of extraordinary originality -- the swooping, birdlike TWA terminal at New York's Kennedy Airport and St. Louis' Gateway Arch; buildings for Yale University, General Motors, Bell Labs, IBM and John Deere; homes, churches, embassies, and those icons of modernism, the pedestal chair and table.
He was a household name and magazine cover boy, his face on the front of Time in 1956 and his "womb chair" satirized by Norman Rockwell in a 1959 Saturday Evening Post cover.
And then it ended. In 1961, Saarinen died from complications after surgery for a brain tumor. He was 51. In the next four years, his firm finished nine of his major buildings, including the TWA terminal, Dulles Airport, New York's CBS building and St. Louis' arch. But in successive decades, his fame faded as architecture rejected innovative form in favor of boxy, orthodox modernism followed by postmodern pastiche and irony.
Now an exhibition at Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, running through Jan. 4, redresses that neglect. With hundreds of intimate photos, architectural drawings, huge models and samples of furniture, the show puts Saarinen's work at center stage in all its breathtaking inventiveness, elegant serenity and technological brio.
The architect's daughter, Susan Saarinen, and architectural archivist Mark Coir will discuss his family and work at 2 p.m. today at the institute.
"My father's work was not easy to categorize, and some critics said each building is so different that he doesn't have any consistent style," said Susan Saarinen recently by phone from Golden, Colo., where she is a landscape architect. "He was kind of an oddball in that respect, and he fell out of favor."
That began to change in 2002 after Saarinen's archives were given to Yale University by his successor firm, Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates. With the passage of time and the opportunity to put all of his work in perspective, scholars saw repeated design concepts that clarified his intentions.
"If you look at a Mies [van der Rohe] building, you see the same themes all the way through, but there is not a singular look to my father's work," Saarinen said. "He said each program for a building has to be different, and a New York City skyscraper shouldn't look like an airport and an airport shouldn't look like a chapel. He wanted to express whatever that building should express in its own form."
The Yale archives became the basis of the current show, which opened in Helsinki, Finland, in 2006 before embarking on a four-year tour to Oslo, Norway; Brussels, Belgium; Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. It was organized by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York; the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, and the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., with help from the Yale University School of Architecture.
American modernist
At the epicenter of what has been called the American Century, Saarinen's designs epitomized the country's brash confidence, expansive wealth and technological skills. He applied industrial know-how to corporate buildings, using automotive window seals to fix glass in the General Motors headquarters, surrounding the John Deere building with new Cor-Ten steel that looked like rusted plowshares but didn't corrode, and molding chairs from fiberglass.
Saarinen literally inherited his design prowess. His father, Eliel, was an internationally famous architect, his mother, Loja, a textile designer and sculptor, his sister Pipsan a designer and interior decorator. He was 13 when the family emigrated to the United States, soon settling in suburban Detroit, where his father began designing an educational complex that includes the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Eero worked in his father's office through high school, then studied sculpture in Paris for two years and graduated from Yale's architecture school in 1934.
The 1930s and '40s saw Eero winning competitions, doing high-profile projects at the New York World's Fair and the Museum of Modern Art, and collaborating with his father and Cranbrook grads Charles Eames and Ralph Rapson, among others. After his father's death in 1950, Eero took over the family firm and embarked on a decade of award-winning commissions.
Showboater extraordinaire
"He was arguably the most famous architect in America when he died, the architect of big business, known for his embassies and furniture design," said historian Coir, former director of the Cranbrook Academy archives. "But by the end of the 1960s and early '70s, he wasn't even taught in architecture schools. He had dropped off the face of design. He was considered theatrical, a showboater. ... It wasn't until the resurgence of midcentury modernism in furniture -- the womb chair, the pedestal chair -- that he was looked at again."
The show documents more than 50 of Saarinen's projects, including some unbuilt designs. His staff photographer, Balthazar Korab, who took many of the images, was a lens wizard who invented ways to photograph models so they looked like finished buildings -- a very persuasive sales technique in that precomputer era. The show is rich in marvelous pictures of bold structures under construction, designers debating the merits of huge walk-in models and dramatically lit finished projects. Prototypes show the famous chairs evolving from clunky molded plywood to sleek production numbers.
Because the show is so vast, the two museums have divided it thematically. The Walker features his designs for furniture, residences, churches and academic and corporate campuses. The institute will house his biggest models along with designs for airports, memorials, embassies and early modernist projects. Local highlights include plans for Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis (on which father and son both worked) and the IBM building in Rochester.
"He was a man of his place and time, but then he does go a step beyond in creating these dynamic forms," said Jennifer Komar Olivarez, the institute's associate curator who is overseeing the Minneapolis presentation with Andrew Blauvelt, Walker's design curator. "He learned to look at each problem individually and each building looks different because it fit the job.
"The TWA terminal was about motion and monumentality, but the Yale dormitories are a modern medieval village. ... It's all about exploring tradition and new materials in different ways."
Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431
In the United States throughout the 1950s, it was a Finnish-born architect, Eero Saarinen, who shaped American dreams and ambitions with innovative buildings and imaginative furniture.
For 11 short years, Saarinen was a creative dynamo, spinning out designs of extraordinary originality -- the swooping, birdlike TWA terminal at New York's Kennedy Airport and St. Louis' Gateway Arch; buildings for Yale University, General Motors, Bell Labs, IBM and John Deere; homes, churches, embassies, and those icons of modernism, the pedestal chair and table.
He was a household name and magazine cover boy, his face on the front of Time in 1956 and his "womb chair" satirized by Norman Rockwell in a 1959 Saturday Evening Post cover.
And then it ended. In 1961, Saarinen died from complications after surgery for a brain tumor. He was 51. In the next four years, his firm finished nine of his major buildings, including the TWA terminal, Dulles Airport, New York's CBS building and St. Louis' arch. But in successive decades, his fame faded as architecture rejected innovative form in favor of boxy, orthodox modernism followed by postmodern pastiche and irony.
Now an exhibition at Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, running through Jan. 4, redresses that neglect. With hundreds of intimate photos, architectural drawings, huge models and samples of furniture, the show puts Saarinen's work at center stage in all its breathtaking inventiveness, elegant serenity and technological brio.
The architect's daughter, Susan Saarinen, and architectural archivist Mark Coir will discuss his family and work at 2 p.m. today at the institute.
"My father's work was not easy to categorize, and some critics said each building is so different that he doesn't have any consistent style," said Susan Saarinen recently by phone from Golden, Colo., where she is a landscape architect. "He was kind of an oddball in that respect, and he fell out of favor."
That began to change in 2002 after Saarinen's archives were given to Yale University by his successor firm, Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates. With the passage of time and the opportunity to put all of his work in perspective, scholars saw repeated design concepts that clarified his intentions.
"If you look at a Mies [van der Rohe] building, you see the same themes all the way through, but there is not a singular look to my father's work," Saarinen said. "He said each program for a building has to be different, and a New York City skyscraper shouldn't look like an airport and an airport shouldn't look like a chapel. He wanted to express whatever that building should express in its own form."
The Yale archives became the basis of the current show, which opened in Helsinki, Finland, in 2006 before embarking on a four-year tour to Oslo, Norway; Brussels, Belgium; Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. It was organized by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York; the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, and the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., with help from the Yale University School of Architecture.
American modernist
At the epicenter of what has been called the American Century, Saarinen's designs epitomized the country's brash confidence, expansive wealth and technological skills. He applied industrial know-how to corporate buildings, using automotive window seals to fix glass in the General Motors headquarters, surrounding the John Deere building with new Cor-Ten steel that looked like rusted plowshares but didn't corrode, and molding chairs from fiberglass.
Saarinen literally inherited his design prowess. His father, Eliel, was an internationally famous architect, his mother, Loja, a textile designer and sculptor, his sister Pipsan a designer and interior decorator. He was 13 when the family emigrated to the United States, soon settling in suburban Detroit, where his father began designing an educational complex that includes the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Eero worked in his father's office through high school, then studied sculpture in Paris for two years and graduated from Yale's architecture school in 1934.
The 1930s and '40s saw Eero winning competitions, doing high-profile projects at the New York World's Fair and the Museum of Modern Art, and collaborating with his father and Cranbrook grads Charles Eames and Ralph Rapson, among others. After his father's death in 1950, Eero took over the family firm and embarked on a decade of award-winning commissions.
Showboater extraordinaire
"He was arguably the most famous architect in America when he died, the architect of big business, known for his embassies and furniture design," said historian Coir, former director of the Cranbrook Academy archives. "But by the end of the 1960s and early '70s, he wasn't even taught in architecture schools. He had dropped off the face of design. He was considered theatrical, a showboater. ... It wasn't until the resurgence of midcentury modernism in furniture -- the womb chair, the pedestal chair -- that he was looked at again."
The show documents more than 50 of Saarinen's projects, including some unbuilt designs. His staff photographer, Balthazar Korab, who took many of the images, was a lens wizard who invented ways to photograph models so they looked like finished buildings -- a very persuasive sales technique in that precomputer era. The show is rich in marvelous pictures of bold structures under construction, designers debating the merits of huge walk-in models and dramatically lit finished projects. Prototypes show the famous chairs evolving from clunky molded plywood to sleek production numbers.
Because the show is so vast, the two museums have divided it thematically. The Walker features his designs for furniture, residences, churches and academic and corporate campuses. The institute will house his biggest models along with designs for airports, memorials, embassies and early modernist projects. Local highlights include plans for Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis (on which father and son both worked) and the IBM building in Rochester.
"He was a man of his place and time, but then he does go a step beyond in creating these dynamic forms," said Jennifer Komar Olivarez, the institute's associate curator who is overseeing the Minneapolis presentation with Andrew Blauvelt, Walker's design curator. "He learned to look at each problem individually and each building looks different because it fit the job.
"The TWA terminal was about motion and monumentality, but the Yale dormitories are a modern medieval village. ... It's all about exploring tradition and new materials in different ways."
Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
