REA APPROVED! Excursion

Today our staff was sent out in pairs to discover the things we normally ignore during our hectic New York City lives.  The city is filled with wonders large and small that we miss on our rushed way to work.  This was a chance for us to walk aimlessly to search for the beautiful things the city has to offer–focusing on design, architecture, and street art.

The staff brought back a lot of photos in a mere hour’s time, so we’ll post them bit by bit.  Check out our REA APPROVED blog for Part I.

Do you have any suggestions of places in the city where we can find some inspirational street art work?

Real Estate Arts HAS AN APP FOR THAT!

Here is a press release REA recently sent out, about a new online application we’re developing for the iPad.  What do you think?

taking the "OM" digital

New York, NY, November 4, 2011 — Real Estate Arts Inc, a leading real estate-focused branding and marketing agency based in New York, announced today its commitment to revolutionizing the way commercial property asset and investment sales are marketed.

Real Estate Arts (REA) is well known in the commercial real estate investment sales community for transforming the standard Offering Memorandum package from one of a simple pictorial word document to a fully-branded and highly-designed showcase marketing tool. REA’s work has won numerous awards for its innovative design, but more importantly has helped brokers and owners of the most prestigious properties command the highest prices per square foot in many markets across the US.

REA President Michael Goodgold said, “As the investment sales market comes back, many of our clients are again looking to us to improve the sales and marketing process. The introduction of tablets and especially the iPAD has given marketers like us a real reason to get excited.”

Technology takes the lead in REA’s innovative marketing approach, which allows potential acquirers to experience the property’s assets through the use of an online application.  The tablet opens up new possibilities for the disposition process, blending different types of technology, ranging from video and mapping to interactive informational graphics.  Unlike the foregone era, in which prospective buyers learned about properties only through static printed pages, the tablet provides a dynamic experience, with information that can be constantly updated.  Furthermore, it organizes all property information in one place, so buyers don’t have to jump from various sources—print brochures, websites, or booklets to accomplish their goals.

For the past 15 years, Real Estate Arts has helped owners and their brokers sell some of the most prestigious properties around the world—from luxury hotels and resorts to Class A Office towers and multifamily properties.  Goodgold added that REA continues to work with some of the smartest technology minds that have helped develop name brand applications that most people experience daily.

“From a user standpoint our focus is squarely on the experience of the acquisition professional,” he said.  “Those men and women are constantly looking at deals and want a tool where they can manage the entire process from one easy place.”

At One With Nature (Design By Nature)

By REA Intern Jess Wertheim

Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s beloved and arguably most famous architect, took the concept of “being at one with nature” to a whole new level when he built Fallingwater.  Inspired by nature, Wright built amongst it. Fallingwater is a home that Wright designed and built over a 30’ waterfall between 1936 and 1939 for the Kauffman family. It has become a National Historic Landmark.

Located in southwestern Pennsylvania, the home straddles a 30-foot waterfall on Bear Run in the Laurel Highlands of the Allegheny Mountains.  Wright wanted the family to live intimately with the fall — where they could see it, hear it, and feel it around them all the time.  The attention to space, focus, and the harmonious relationship between man and nature reflects the strong influence of Japanese architecture on Wright.

Wright successfully incorporated the home’s natural surroundings.  Observing the structure and standing inside it, one feels a part of nature and home.  This integration is felt, for example, in the living room: one can watch as the water flows away through a huge glass window on the floor; the fireplace is built from boulders selected from the site; and ledge rock protrudes into the living room in order to link the outdoors with the indoors.  A pool is formed one floor below, and a natural shower uses the mountain water from the fall another floor below.  In windows and walls where glass meets stone, the absence of metal frames adds to the natural, organic feel of the home.

The soothing sound of water fills the house, the vivacious forest blows in the wind, the rocky boulders jut out from the falling water, and the occupant is at one with nature.

Art & Cartography

Matthew Cusick, Chasing the Dragon, 2006

By Lecia Bushak, REA Intern

Cartography has always been considered a utilitarian craft of precise measurements, science and geography.  But a number of contemporary artists have begun experimenting with maps in their artwork, stepping outside traditional representation and into a world of abstraction.

There is something aesthetically pleasing about the complexity of a map, and the attempt to draw order and detail over the chaos of our existence.  But even more than that, maps provide the artist an immensity of material to appropriate, collage and re-imagine.  These artists play with the meaning of scale, location and dislocation; political and social motifs; power, territory, and boundaries.

Maps in art examine the relationship between micro and macro – for example, the similarity between a microscopic network of human cells and capillaries, and that of roads and highways, cities as hearts or central nervous systems, roads as connecting veins that branch out into tinier and tinier routes, like rivers, into miniscule oblivion.  We can link the complexity of our own bodies to the intricacy of a map — both the human body and the land are infinities in their own right.  Both are filled with the Unknown, and no matter how detailed or accurate our attempts to chart these Unknowns may be, there will always be a gap in our knowledge.

But by taking apart these maps, recombining them in no linear or logical order, and incorporating them into collages, artists have found a way to discover a new way of looking at the world – not as something that can be planned or overseen through calculations, but as something that must be navigated through abstraction.

Here is a list of artists who use maps in their contemporary work.

A Mediterranean chart from the 14th century, already quite abstract

Matthew Cusick, Red & Blue, 2010

Matthew Cusick, Untitled Wave (Black and Blue), 2008

Qin Ga, Long March

Leila Daw, **** (Four Star) SiteLeila Daw, 6 map icons

elin o’Hara slavick, World Map, Protesting Cartography: Places the United States has Bombed, 2002

elin o’Hara slavick, Afghanistan I

Noriko Ambe, Flat Globe “Atlas”, 2006

Across the East River

This year’s 4th of July fireworks were shown over the Hudson, but instead of fighting the crowds on the West Side, REA Designer Anthony “Chip” Fernandez decided to get a unique perspective from the other side — in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

This shot was taken using a Canon Powershot Elph 300 HS on automatic setting, with Manhattan silhouetted against the backdrop of the firework glow and sparkle.