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A building in China

A building and skybridge in Munich, Germany.

Example of a religious building: the Great Mosque of Kairouan (also called the Mosque of Uqba), founded in 670, dates in its present state principally from the 9th century. The Great Mosque of Kairouan is located in the city of Kairouan, Tunisia.

Rivers Towers building under construction. Cúcuta, Colombia.

In architecture, construction, engineering, real estate development and technology the word building may refer to one of the following:

1. Any human-made structure used or intended for supporting or sheltering any use or continuous occupancy, or
2. An act of construction (i. e. the activity of building, see also builder)

In this article, the first usage is generally intended unless otherwise specified.

Buildings come in a wide amount of shapes and functions, and have been adapted throughout history for a wide number of factors, from building materials available, to weather conditions, to land prices, ground conditions, specific uses and aesthetic reasons.

Buildings serve several needs of society – primarily as shelter from weather and as general living space, to provide privacy, to store belongings and to comfortably live and work. A building as a shelter represents a physical division of the human habitat (a place of comfort and safety) and the outside (a place that at times may be harsh and harmful).

Ever since the first cave paintings, buildings have also become objects or canvasess of artistic expression. In recent years, interest in sustainable planning and building practices has also become part of the design process of many new buildings.

Definitions[link]

Building is defined in many aspects as:

• As a Civil Engineering structures such as a house, worship centre, Factories etc. that has a foundation,wall,roof etc. that protect human being and their properties from direct harsh effect of weather like rain,wind,sun etc.
• The act of constructing, erecting, or establishing.
• The art of constructing edifices, or the practice of civil architecture.
• That which is built; a fabric or edifice constructed, as a house, a church, castle, arena/ stadium, etc.
• The act of constructing or building something; "during the construction we had to take a detour"; "his hobby was the building of boats"
• The commercial activity involved in constructing buildings; "their main business is home construction"; "workers in the building trades"
• A structure that has a roof and walls and stands more or less permanently in one place;^[1] "there was a three-storey building on the corner"; "it was an imposing edifice"
• The occupants of a building; "the entire building complained about the noise"

To differentiate buildings in the usage of this article from other buildings and other structures that are not intended for continuous human occupancy, the latter are called non-building structures or simply structures.

Structural height in technical usage is the height to the highest architectural detail on building from street-level. Depending on how they are classified, spires and masts may or may not be included in this height. Spires and masts used as antennas are not generally included.

The definition of a low-rise vs. a high-rise building is a matter of debate, but generally three storeys or less is considered low-rise.^[2]

History[link]

The first shelter on Earth constructed by a relatively close ancestor to humans is believed to be built 500,000 years ago by an early ancestor of humans, Homo erectus.^[3]

Types[link]

A timber framing house in Marburg, Germany.

Residential[link]

Residential buildings are called houses/homes, though buildings containing large numbers of separate dwelling units are often called apartment buildings or apartment blocks to differentiate them from the more 'individual' house.

Building types may range from one-room wood-framed, masonry, or adobe dwellings to multi-million dollar high-rise buildings able to house thousands of people. Increasing settlement density in buildings (and closer distances between buildings) is usually a response to high ground prices resulting from many people wanting to live close to work or similar attractors.

Multi-story[link]

Some of Denver's multi-story buildings.

A multi-story building is a building that has multiple floors above ground in the building.

Multi-story buildings aim to increase the area of the building without increasing the area of the land the building is built on, hence saving land and, in most cases, money (depending on material used and land prices in the area). The building with the most stories is the Burj Khalifa, with 162.

Creation[link]

The practice of designing, constructing, and operating buildings is most usually a collective effort of different groups of professionals and trades. Depending on the size, complexity, and purpose of a particular building project, the project team may include:

• A real estate developer who secures funding for the project;
• One or more financial institutions or other investors that provide the funding
• Local planning and code authorities
• A Surveyor who performs an ALTA/ACSM and construction surveys throughout the project;
• Construction managers who coordinate the effort of different groups of project participants;
• Licensed architects and engineers who provide building design and prepare construction documents;
• Landscape architects;
• Interior designers;
• Other consultants;
• Contractors who provide construction services and install building systems such as climate control, electrical, plumbing, Decoration, fire protection, security and telecommunications;
• Marketing or leasing agents;
• Facility managers who are responsible for operating the building.

Regardless of their size or intended use, all buildings in the US must comply with zoning ordinances, building codes and other regulations such as fire codes, life safety codes and related standards.

Vehicles—such as trailers, caravans, ships and passenger aircraft—are treated as "buildings" for life safety purposes.

Ownership and funding[link]

• Mortgage loan
• Real estate developer

Building services[link]

Physical plant[link]

The BB&T Building in Macon, Georgia is constructed of aluminum.

Any building requires a certain amount of internal infrastructure to function, which includes such elements like heating / cooling, power and telecommunications, water and wastewater etc. Especially in commercial buildings (such as offices or factories), these can be extremely intricate systems taking up large amounts of space (sometimes located in separate areas or double floors / false ceilings) and constitute a big part of the regular maintenance required.

Conveying systems[link]

Systems for transport of people within buildings:

• Elevator
• Escalator
• Moving sidewalk (horizontal and inclined)

Systems for transport of people between interconnected buildings:

• Skyway
• Underground city

Building damage[link]

A building in Massueville, Quebec, Canada engulfed by fire.

Buildings may be damaged during the construction of the building or during maintenance. There are several other reasons behind building damage like accident.^[4] Buildings also may suffer from fire damage and flooding in special circumstances.

See also[link]

• Autonomous building
• Building material
• Earthquake engineering
• Famous buildings
• Float glass
• Green building
• Hurricane-proof building
• List of building types
• List of largest buildings in the world
• Natural building
• Natural disaster and earthquake
• Nonbuilding structure
• Skyscrapers
• Steel building
• Commercial modular construction

Architecture portal

References[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Buildings

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Building.

Regina Spektor
Regina Spektor playing an electronic piano in 2006
Background information
Native name	Реги́нa Ильи́нична Спе́ктор
Born	(1980-02-18) February 18, 1980 (age 32) Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Origin	New York, U.S.
Genres	Anti-folk, indie rock, baroque pop, blues, pop
Occupations	Singer, songwriter, record producer
Instruments	Piano, vocals, guitar, bass guitar
Years active	1999–present
Labels	Sire/Warner Bros. Records
Associated acts	Sondre Lerche, Ben Folds, Kill Kenada, the Strokes, Dufus
Website	http://www.reginaspektor.com
Notable instruments
Steinway & Sons piano Epiphone Wildkat guitar Regina Spektor's Autograph

Regina Ilyinichna Spektor (Russian: Реги́нa Ильи́нична Спе́ктор, IPA: [rʲɪˈɡʲinə ˈspʲɛktər], English: /rɨˈdʒiːnə ˈspɛktər/; born February 18, 1980) is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. Her music is associated with the anti-folk scene centered in New York City's East Village.

Early life[link]

Spektor was born in Moscow, Soviet Union in 1980 to a musical Russian Jewish family. Her father, Ilya Spektor, is a photographer and amateur violinist. Her mother, Bella Spektor, was a music professor in a Soviet college of music and now teaches at a public elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York.^[1] She has a brother Barry (Bear), who was featured in track 7, "* * *", or "Whisper", of her 2004 album, Soviet Kitsch.

She learned how to play piano by practising on a Petrof upright that was given to her mother by her grandfather.^[2] She was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union.^[1] The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine and a half, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate. Regina had to leave her piano behind.^[3] The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not leaving the USSR, but they finally decided to emigrate, due to the ethnic and political discrimination that Jews faced.^[4] Spektor is fluent in Russian and reads Hebrew, and has since paid tribute to her Russian heritage, quoting the poem February by the Russian poet Boris Pasternak in her song Après Moi, and stating “I’m very connected to the language and the culture.”^[5]

Traveling first to Austria and then Italy, the family was admitted to the United States as refugees with the assistance of HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) and settled in The Bronx, where Spektor graduated from the SAR Academy, a Jewish day middle school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She then attended high school for two years at the Frisch School, a yeshiva in Paramus, New Jersey, but transferred to a public school, Fair Lawn High School, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, where she finished the last two years of her high school education.^[6]

Career[link]

In New York, Spektor studied classical piano with Sonia Vargas, a professor at the Manhattan School of Music, until she was 17; Spektor's father had met Vargas through her husband, violinist Samuel Marder.^[7] Although the family had been unable to bring their piano from Russia, Spektor found a piano on which to play in the basement of her synagogue, and also practiced on tabletops and other hard surfaces.

Spektor was originally interested only in classical music, but later became interested in hip hop, rock and punk as well.^[1] Although she had always made up songs around the house, Spektor first became interested in more formal songwriting during a visit to Israel with the Nesiya Institute in her teenage years when she attracted attention from the other children on the trip for the songs she made up while hiking and realized she had an aptitude for songwriting.^[4]

Following this trip, she was exposed to the work of Joni Mitchell, Ani DiFranco, and other singer-songwriters, which encouraged her belief that she could create her own songs.^[4] She wrote her first a cappella songs around the age of 16 and her first songs for voice and piano when she was nearly 18.^[1]

Spektor completed the four-year studio composition program of the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College within three years, graduating with honors in 2001. Around this time, she also worked briefly at a butterfly farm in Luck, Wisconsin,^[8] and studied in Tottenham, ( a suburb of London) for one semester ^[9].

She gradually achieved recognition through performances in the anti-folk scene in downtown New York City, often as a duo with drummer Anders Griffen, and most importantly at the East Village's Sidewalk Cafe, but also at the Living Room, Tonic, Fez, the Knitting Factory, and CB's Gallery.^{[citation needed]} She also performed at local colleges (such as Sarah Lawrence College) with other musicians, including the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. She sold self-published CDs at her performances during this period: 11:11 (2001) and Songs (2002). In 2004, she signed a contract with Warner Brothers' record label Sire Records to publish and distribute her third album Soviet Kitsch, originally self-released in 2003.

Spektor is married to Jack Dishel, guitarist with the band The Moldy Peaches.^[9]

Style[link]

Regina Spektor in concert, April 2007.

Spektor has said that she has created a great number of songs,^[10] but that she rarely writes any of them down. She has also stated that she never aspired to write songs herself, but songs seem to just flow to her.^[11] Spektor's songs are not usually autobiographical, but rather are based on scenarios and characters drawn from her imagination.^[4][12] Her songs show influences from folk,^[13][14] punk, rock, Jewish,^[12][15] Russian,^[12] hip hop,^[13][16][17] jazz,^[13][16] and classical music.^[12][16] Spektor has said that she works hard to ensure that each of her songs has its own musical style, rather than trying to develop a distinctive style for her music as a whole.^[11]

It doesn't feel natural for me to write some diary type song. I want to write a classic like Yesterday but weird songs about meatballs in refrigerators come into my head - I can't help it.^[18]

Spektor has a broad vocal range and uses the full extent of it. She also explores a variety of different and somewhat unorthodox vocal techniques, such as verses composed entirely of buzzing noises made with the lips and beatbox-style flourishes in the middle of ballads, and also makes use of such unusual musical techniques as using a drum stick to tap rhythms on the body of the piano or chair.^[4][19] Part of her style also results from the exaggeration of certain aspects of vocalization, most notably the glottal stop, which is prominent in the single "Fidelity". She also uses a strong New York accent on some words, which she has said is due to her love of New York and its culture.^[1]

Her lyrics are equally eclectic, often taking the form of abstract narratives or first-person character studies, similar to short stories or vignettes put to song.^[1][19] Spektor usually sings in English, though she sometimes includes a few words or verses of Latin, Russian, French, and other languages in her songs. She also plays with pronunciations, which she said on a NPR interview to be a remnant of her early years when she listened to pop in English without understanding the lyrics. Some of Spektor's lyrics include literary allusions,^[4] such as to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in "Poor Little Rich Boy", The Little Prince in "Baobabs", Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood in "Paris", Ezra Pound and William Shakespeare in "Pound of Flesh", Shakespeare's Hamlet in "The Virgin Queen", Boris Pasternak in "Après Moi", Samson and Delilah in "Samson", and Oedipus the King in "Oedipus", Billie Holiday in "Lady" and Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome in "2.99 cent blues". She alludes to The Beatles and Paul McCartney in the song "Edit". She also used a line from Joni Mitchell's California in her song "The Devil Came to Bethlehem". Recurring themes and topics in Spektor's lyrics include love, death, religion (particularly Biblical and Jewish references), city life (particularly New York references), and certain key phrases have been known to recur in different songs by Spektor, such as references to gravediggers, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the name "Mary Ann". Spektor's use of satire is evident in "Wasteside," which refers to The Twelve Chairs, the classic satirical novel by the Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov, and describes the town in which people are born, get their hair cut, and then are sent to the cemetery.

In Spektor's early albums, many of her tracks had a very dry vocal production, with very little reverb or delay added. However, Spektor's more recent albums, particularly Begin to Hope, have put more emphasis into song production and have relied more on traditional pop and rock instruments.^[3] Spektor says the records that most impact her are those of "bands whose music is really involved",^[20] specifically naming The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, Radiohead, Tom Waits, and Frédéric Chopin as primary influences.^[20][21]

In her songs, "Eet", "Us" and "Après Moi" the titular sounds are used as the focal point throughout. (In "Dance Anthem of the 80's", the sound "eet" is also used often, on words such as "meat", "street", and "eat").

Performances[link]

Regina Spektor at her first performance in Tel Aviv, Israel on March 3, 2007

Spektor's first nationwide tour was accompanying The Strokes as the opening act on their 2003–2004 Room on Fire tour, during which she and the band performed and recorded "Modern Girls & Old Fashion Men". Kings of Leon were the second opening act on that tour, and they invited Regina to open for them on their own European tour right after The Strokes tour. In June 2005, Spektor was the opening act for the English piano rock band Keane on their North American tour, during which she performed at Radio City Music Hall on June 7, 2005.^[22] During her 2006 headlining tour in support of the Begin to Hope album, Spektor sold out a performance at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, and two shows at Town Hall Theater in New York City on September 27 and September 28, 2006.^[23]

Spektor has appeared on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien (once), Late Night with Conan O'Brien (three times), The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (twice), Jimmy Kimmel Live (twice), Last Call with Carson Daly (five times), Late Show with David Letterman (twice), Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (twice), CBS News Sunday Morning, Good Morning America (twice), Australia's Rove Live, and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (twice).^[24] On October 10, 2009 she performed on Saturday Night Live.

Since January 2005, Spektor has performed on a bright red Baldwin baby grand piano.^[25] At the present time she uses exclusively Steinway & Sons pianos. She plays a seafoam Epiphone Wildkat archtop hollow-body electric guitar.^[26]

Although she generally only performs original material, Spektor occasionally performs covers. Most famous of these covers were her performances of songs by Leonard Cohen and Madonna, for the 2nd Annual Jewish Music & Heritage Festival at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.^[4] In 2006 and 2007, Spektor embarked on a headlining tour of the U.S. and Europe, selling out numerous clubs and theaters. She covered John Lennon's "Real Love" at the performance arts center of her alma mater, State University of New York at Purchase, on March 28, 2007, at a benefit concert for the Conservatory of Music.^[27] In 2007, Spektor recorded "Real Love" for the Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur CD, which was released in June of that year. She recorded a version of the song for Triple J's Like a Version radio segment which was shown on jTV.

Regina Spektor performing in Brighton on October 26, 2006.

On March 8, 2007, Spektor appeared on the British ITV network's Loose Women, promoting and performing "Fidelity" live, and on April 20, 2007, she performed on the Late Show with David Letterman. On Saturday, April 28, 2007, she appeared at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. On Friday, May 18, 2007, she appeared on BBC1's Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. On June 16, 2007, she performed at the Bonnaroo Music Festival and later performed at the 2007 Lollapalooza on August 4, 2007 and Virgin Festival on August 5, 2007 in Baltimore, Maryland. On September 16, 2007, she performed at the Austin City Limits Music Festival and recorded a set for the Austin City Limits TV show the following day. She performed acoustic at the Bridge School Benefit at Shoreline Amphitheatre on October 27 and October 28, 2007.

On November 14, 2007, at her concert at Ryman Auditorium, in Nashville, it was announced that Spektor collapsed during the sound check and was taken to a local emergency room. According to the statement given to the audience, Spektor was fine, but doctors said that she could not perform that night. It was later reported that the cause of the collapse was an inner ear infection which caused intense vertigo. The show was initially rescheduled for December 6, 2007,^[28] but the date was once again rescheduled, and the concert finally occurred on February 29, 2008.^[29] After her initial collapse in Nashville, she was able to perform in concerts at Mountain Stage on November 18, 2007,^{[30][citation needed]} and at Duke University on November 19, 2007.^[31]

In conjunction with the release of her 2009 album Far, Spektor was headlining at Serpentine Sessions, a series of concerts London's Hyde Park on June 29, 2009. Other European performances in 2009 include Glastonbury Festival, Hultsfred Festival, Oxegen 2009, T in the Park, Paradiso (Amsterdam), Latitude Festival, and Rock Werchter. Spektor has invited Brooklyn-based rock band Jupiter One to open concerts on her 2009 North American tour. As a part of that tour, on October 14, 2009 Spektor headlined a concert at the Radio City Music Hall in NYC.

On July 7, 2010, Regina performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland.^[32] Her cellist, Dan Cho, drowned the day before while swimming in Lake Geneva near the Chillon Castle.^[33][34] She was described as distraught, shaken, and in tears and took several breaks to regain her composure.^[35]

Media coverage[link]

Spektor performing at the Hammerstein Ballroom on October 16, 2007

Regina Spektor performing in the West London Synagogue, February 2007.

Since 2005, Spektor's music has been used in various television programs and commercials. In late 2005 "Us" (from Soviet Kitsch) was used in a commercial as part of the What Do You Want To Watch? series for the United Kingdom's British Sky Broadcasting. The advert features a clip from a documentary on skateboarder Danny Way. In the summer of 2006, a clip from "Us" was used for the teaser website for Microsoft's Zune project at ComingZune.com, as well as for a promotional campaign for MtvU. The same track is used by Dutch telecom company KPN in a commercial. "Somedays" was used in a 2005 episode of CSI: NY and "Samson" was used in a 2006 episode of the same series. "On the Radio" was used in an episode of ABC's Grey's Anatomy. "Field Below" was used in a 2006 episode titled "The Last Word" of CBS's Criminal Minds. "Fidelity" has also been used in an episode of Grey's Anatomy titled "Six Days, Part 2", Veronica Mars titled "Wichita Linebacker", Brothers & Sisters titled "Sexual Politics", during the end credits of Love and Other Drugs, and in the Brazilian telenovela A Favorita. "Better" is currently being used in a commercial for XM Satellite Radio, an episode of "How I Met Your Mother", and the popular film My Sister's Keeper. Her song "Music Box" is currently being used in a commercial for JC Penney. Spektor also sang the title song "Little Boxes" of Showtime's television series Weeds in the episode "Mile Deep and a Foot Wide" (2006) and her "Ghost of Corporate Future" was used both at the beginning and end of the episode.^[36] On January 21, 2007, she was featured on CBS News Sunday Morning.^[11]

Spektor received increased attention in 2006 when her video for "Fidelity" was viewed over 200,000 times in two days on YouTube. On Sirius Radio's Left of Center channel, her single "Fidelity" was voted by listeners as the #1 song of 2006. Towards the end of 2006, VH1 showcased her as part of their "You Oughta Know: Artists on the Rise" featurettes: they played clips from the "Fidelity" music video and showed parts of an interview with Spektor during commercial breaks on the channel.^[37] Spektor's video for "Fidelity" reached #3 on VH1's Top 20 Countdown.^{[citation needed]}

Peter Gabriel recorded a version of "Après Moi" on his 2010 release Scratch My Back.

In Australia, Spektor's music has rapidly gained popularity in mainstream culture primarily due to Begin to Hope being played on the nation-wide radio station Triple J, where it eventually became a feature album. Prior to Begin to Hope, Spektor had only a small following in Australia in comparison to the US and Europe.

Spektor reached #33 on Blender magazine's top 100 of 2006 and was also listed as one of the "Hottest Women of...Rock!".^[38] "Fidelity" was also used in a 2007 television commercial in New Zealand advertising Yahoo!Xtra, a new partnership between Yahoo! and Telecom's Xtra ISP. Also in 2007, the mobile phone company Vodafone used her lyric, "Come into my world..." from the track, "Hotel Song" on Begin to Hope, in an extensive TV advertising campaign in the UK and Ireland.

On October 1, 2007, Spektor's new video for "Better" was released on VH1 and YouTube, where it was viewed more than 100,000 times within the first 24 hours. "Fidelity" was used in the trailer for the film 27 Dresses, released on October 3, 2007.^[39]

Her song "The Call" appeared prominently in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian,^[40] as part of the film's finale sequence. Spektor's song "Better" was used in the movie My Sister's Keeper, loosely based on the novel of the same name by Jodi Picoult. A section of "That Time" was featured in the film In Bruges. Additionally, "Us" and "Hero" are both featured on the soundtrack for the film (500) Days of Summer. Spin magazine profiled Spektor in their July 2009 issue, where she discussed her just-released album Far. The story was released in their digital edition that month, as well.^[41] In August 2009, the song "Two Birds" was used in the 2009 Fall Campaign of the Polish TV station TVN. Also Regina's song "Eet" debuted on the show 90210 in April 2010.

On September 16, 2009, it was announced that Spektor would write the music for the musical Beauty, a modern adaptation of the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, which is set to open during the 2011–12 Broadway season.^[42]

In May 2010, Spektor performed for President Obama and his wife Michelle along with hundreds of other guests at the White House reception in honor of Jewish Heritage Month. She sang "Us" and "The Sword & the Pen", receiving a standing ovation begun by Michelle Obama.

The song "Human of the Year" featured prominently in the trailer and first episode of the 2011 HBO series Enlightened.

The song "All the Rowboats" was featured on The CW's Ringer in March 2012.

The Song "Hotel Song" was featured in the opening of the movie Friends with Kids.

Philanthropy[link]

In 2007, she covered John Lennon's "Real Love" for Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur. The following year, she participated in Songs for Tibet, an initiative to support the human rights situation in Tibet and the 14th Dalai Lama. The album was issued on August 5, 2008, via iTunes and on August 19 in music stores around the world.^[43] On January 22, 2009, Spektor performed at the third annual Roe On The Rocks gig at the Bowery Ballroom to raise money for Planned Parenthood New York City.^[44] Also, continuing with her support for Tibet, Regina Spektor played for Tibet House's annual concert at Carnegie Hall on February 26, 2010. Less than one month later, on March 23, 2010, Spektor gave a concert at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza in New York City to raise funds for the work of Doctors Without Borders in Haiti. Also, on April 27, she released a cover of Radiohead's song "No Surprises" with all proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders to help the earthquake victims in Haiti and Chile.

Discography[link]

Albums[link]

• 2001: 11:11
• 2002: Songs
• 2004: Soviet Kitsch
• 2006: Begin to Hope
• 2009: Far
• 2012: What We Saw from the Cheap Seats

Singles[link]

Awards[link]

• Begin to Hope – Shortlist Music Prize (nominated)
• Studio8's Female Voice of August 2009 (won)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Regina Spektor

• Official site
• Regina Spektor at the Internet Movie Database
• Regina Spektor at the Open Directory Project
• "Regina Spektor" interview by Noel Murray (from The A.V. Club, 21 June 2006)
• Interview from Soundcheck, WNYC, 13 September 2005
• Interview from All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 28 June 2006
• Strangers Almanac Column on Regina Spektor from Glide Magazine
• NPR - All Songs Considered 7/22/2009 - Regina Spektor: When Every Sound Sings
• NPR All Things Considered 5/24/2012 - Regina Spektor Still Doesn't Write Anything Down

This article uses bare URLs for citations. Please consider adding full citations so that the article remains verifiable. Several templates and the Reflinks tool are available to assist in formatting. (Reflinks documentation) (March 2012)

Stewart Brand
At home in California, December 2010
Born	(1938-12-14) December 14, 1938 (age 73) Rockford, Illinois
Nationality	American
Occupation	Writer, editor
Known for	The Whole Earth Catalog The WELL Long Now Foundation
Website
http://web.me.com/stewartbrand/SB_homepage/Home.html

Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938 in Rockford, Illinois) is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

Life[link]

Brand attended Phillips Exeter Academy, before studying biology at Stanford University, from which he graduated in 1960. He was married to Lois Jennings, an Ottawa Native American and mathematician.^[1] As a soldier in the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he was later to express the view that his experience in the military had fostered his competence in organizing.^{[citation needed]} A civilian again, in 1962 he studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College, and participated in a legitimate scientific study of then-legal LSD, in Menlo Park, California.

Brand has lived in California ever since. He and his wife, Ryan Phelan, live on Mirene, a 64-foot (20 m)-long working tugboat. Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a former shipyard in Sausalito, California.^[2] He works in Mary Heartline, a grounded fishing boat about 100 yards (91 m) away.^[2] A favorite item of his is a table on which Otis Redding is said to have written “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay”. Brand acquired it from an antiques dealer in Sausalito.^[2]

Merry Pranksters[link]

By the mid 1960s, he was associated with author Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters," and in San Francisco, with his partner Zach Stewart, Brand produced the Trips Festival, an early effort involving rock music and light shows. This was one of the first venues at which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. About 10,000 hippies attended and Haight-Ashbury emerged as a community.^[3] Tom Wolfe describes Brand in the beginning of his book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

NASA image of Earth[link]

Earth from space, by William Anders, Apollo 8, 1968

In 1966, Brand campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He distributed buttons for 25 cents each^[4] asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?"^[5] He thought the image of our planet might be a powerful symbol. In 1968, a NASA astronaut took the photo^[5] and in 1970 Earth Day began to be celebrated.^[4] During a 2003 interview, Brand explained that the image "gave the sense that Earth’s an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it’s so graphic, this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum." During this campaign Brand met Richard Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help him in his projects.

Douglas Engelbart[link]

In late 1968, Brand assisted electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart with The Mother of All Demos, a famous presentation of many revolutionary computer technologies (including hypertext, email, and the mouse) to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

Brand surmised that, given the necessary consciousness, information, and tools, human beings might reshape the world they had made (and were making) for themselves into something environmentally and socially sustainable.

Whole Earth Catalog[link]

One page of a 1969 Whole Earth Catalog

During the late 1960s and early 1970s about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally.^[6] In 1968, using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, Brand and his colleagues created issue number one of The Whole Earth Catalog, a book with the significant subtitle, "access to tools".^[7] Brand and his wife Lois travelled to communes in a 1963 Dodge truck known as the Whole Earth Truck Store, which moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California.^[7] That first oversize Catalog, and its successors in the 1970s and later, reckoned that many sorts of things were useful "tools": books, maps, garden tools, specialized clothing, carpenters' and masons' tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers and personal computers, etc. Brand invited "reviews" of the best of these items from experts in specific fields, as though they were writing a letter to a friend. The information also made known where these things could be located or bought. The Catalog's publication coincided with the great wave of social and cultural experimentation, convention-breaking, and "do it yourself" attitude associated with the "counterculture".

The influence of these Whole Earth Catalogs on the rural back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, and the communities movement within many cities, was widespread, being experienced in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and far beyond. A 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies, and it won the first U.S. National Book Award in category Contemporary Affairs.^[8]

CoEvolution Quarterly[link]

To continue this work and also to publish full-length articles on specific topics in the natural sciences and invention, in numerous areas of the arts and the social sciences, and on the contemporary scene in general, Brand founded the CoEvolution Quarterly (CQ) during 1974, aimed primarily at educated laypersons. Brand never better revealed his opinions and reason for hope than when he ran, in CoEvolution Quarterly #4, a transcription of technology historian Lewis Mumford’s talk “The Next Transformation of Man,” containing the statement: "... man has still within him sufficient resources to alter the direction of modern civilization, for we then need no longer regard man as the passive victim of his own irreversible technological development."

The content of CQ often included futurism or risqué topics. Besides giving space to unknown writers with something valuable to say, Brand presented articles by many respected authors and thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, Howard T. Odum, Witold Rybczynski, Karl Hess, Christopher Swan, Orville Schell, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Bateson, Amory Lovins, Hazel Henderson, Gary Snyder, Lynn Margulis, Eric Drexler, Gerard K. O'Neill, Peter Calthorpe, Sim Van der Ryn, Paul Hawken, John Todd, J. T. Baldwin, Kevin Kelly (future editor of Wired magazine), and Donella Meadows. During ensuing years, Brand authored and edited a number of books on topics as diverse as computer-based media, the life-history of buildings, and ideas about space colonies.

During 1984 the The Whole Earth Software Review (a supplement to The Whole Earth Software Catalog) was founded. It merged with CQ to form the Whole Earth Review in 1985.

California government[link]

During 1977-79, Brand served as "special advisor" to the administration of California Governor Jerry Brown.

The WELL[link]

During 1985, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded The WELL ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over. The WELL won the 1990 Best Online Publication Award from the Computer Press Association.^[9] Almost certainly the ideas behind the WELL were greatly inspired by Douglas Engelbart's work at SRI International; Brand was acknowledged by Engelbart in "The Mother of All Demos" in 1968 when the computer mouse and video conferencing were introduced.^[10]

Global Business Network[link]

During 1986, Brand was a visiting scientist at the Media Laboratory at MIT. Soon after, he became a private-conference organizer for such corporations as Royal Dutch/Shell, Volvo, and AT&T. During 1988, he became a co-founder of the Global Business Network, which explores global futures and business strategies informed by the sorts of values and information which Brand has always found vital. The GBN has become involved with the evolution and application of scenario thinking, planning, and complementary strategic tools. In other connections, Brand has been part of the board of the Santa Fe Institute (founded in 1984), an organization devoted to "fostering a multidisciplinary scientific research community pursuing frontier science." He has also continued to promote the preservation of tracts of wilderness.

Brand listening in Sausalito during 2009.

[edit] Whole Earth Discipline

The Whole Earth Catalog implied an ideal of human progress that depended on decentralized, personal, and liberating technological development — so-called "soft technology." However, during 2005 he criticized aspects of the international environmental ideology he had helped to develop. An article by him entitled Environmental Heresies, published in the May 2005 issue of the MIT Technology Review, describes what he considers necessary changes to environmentalism. He suggested among other things that environmentalists embrace nuclear power and genetically modified organisms as technologies with more promise than risk.

Brand later developed the ideas from the 2005 article into the book Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. The book examines how urbanization, nuclear power, genetic engineering, geoengineering, and wildlife restoration can be used as powerful tools in humanity's ongoing fight against global warming.^[11]

The Long Now Foundation[link]

Brand is co-chair and President of the Board of Directors of the The Long Now Foundation. Brand chairs the foundation's Seminars About Long-term Thinking (SALT). This series on long-term thinking has presented a large range of different speakers including: Brian Eno, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Philip Rosedale, Jimmy Wales, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling and many others.

Aphorisms[link]

A few of Brand's aphorisms (on which he has elaborated) are that "Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems"; "Environmental health requires peace, prosperity, and continuity; "Technology can be good for the environment"; and (perhaps most famously)^[12] "Information wants to be free":

"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."

—spoken at the first Hackers' Conference, and reprinted in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. The quotation is an elaboration from his book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, published in 1987.

The Whole Earth Catalog began with the words "We are as gods and might as well get good at it" and his book Whole Earth Discipline begins with "We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it." Brand wrote The WELL's sign-on message: "You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one."

Works[link]

Stewart Brand is the initiator or was involved with the development of the following:

• The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968
• CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974
• The Whole Earth Software Catalog and Review in 1984
• Whole Earth Review in 1985
• Point Foundation
• Global Business Network (co-founder)
• The WELL in 1985, with Larry Brilliant
• The Hackers Conference in 1984
• Long Now Foundation in 1996, with computer scientist Danny Hillis— one of the Foundation's projects is to build a 10,000 year clock, the Clock of the Long Now.
• New Games Tournament (was involved initially, but left the project)