It revolves, but I wouldn’t refer to it as revolutionary.

Florence based architect David Fisher’s novel idea for a skyscraper leaves me scratching my scalp. The structure will be constructed by factories in Italy, already gearing up for the project, as pods which will be transported to Dubai. Authorities in Dubai haven’t yet signed off on the deal according to The Independent, nor has financing been firmed up. Says the architect:

Today’s life is dynamic, so the space we are living in should be dynamic as well. Buildings will follow rhythms of nature. They will change direction and shape from spring to summer, from sunrise to sunset, and adjust themselves to the weather. In other words, buildings will be alive.

I admire the man’s desire to think outside of the box, but this project isn’t anything more than gimmicky in my opinion. I like it as sculpture, but as a building it seems to placate an impatient, technology saturated culture. Actually living in the thing — it’s being built as condos — seems impractical.

For instance, what happens if I want to watch the sunset from my 40th floor home? Will I have to walk along the outside wall as my floor turns in order to see the clouds change colors? What if there are interior walls that go clear to the exterior wall and I can’t stroll along like I want to? Can I turn the revolving feature off?

One idea I like in this project is the plan to put wind driven turbines in between each floor to generate energy. I’m worried about possible noise from such a feature, but a self-sufficient building is a good design to pursue on this scale. Solar panels will also be used on the “roof,” although I can’t tell where the roof is on the morphing tower.

I suppose, however, I’m not the target market for this kind of dwelling anyway. I’m confident it will be way out of my budget, and moving to the desert isn’t something I plan to do on purpose either.

Beauty, and the idea that there are “objective” standards of Beauty — however far beyond our ability to imagine, create, notate and understand them in this — is a driving force in my life and my art. I generally use the word “Divine” in place of “objective,” but the meaning is the same to me.

The trick is that I also understand the notion of personal aesthetics as described by Alain de Botton in his book The Architecture of Happiness. I’ve mentioned Botton and his ideas a number of times before, particularly here.

What if there is an objective beauty and personal aesthetics. As I brainstorm in my html editor, I’m wondering if our own subjective, personal ideas of beauty aren’t each part of the larger puzzle. Some of us like Victorian architecture, some Gothic, some the beautiful Japanese structures of the Edo period and still others mid-century modern. Perhaps the Divine, objective aesthetic is some unfathomable but utterly perfect combination of all styles.

This is pure speculation of course, and needs some significant mulling over. Even beginning from the point at which I believe that the Divine aesthetic is beyond our ability to imagine, create, notate and understand, this is a thought that seems worth pursuing.

This entry was inspired by Old World Swine’s two most recent posts, No Talent Required and Objective Beauty, both good reads.

Last evening ABC World News reported on more sour real estate statistics. Prices are down almost 27% in Miami and Vegas, and a number other places have also seen 20-plus percent drops in value — although sales were higher in April than they have been recently. They really made it sound just terrible, as though the entire nation were in the grips of an armageddon.

While visiting little Kearney, Nebraska, in May for my sister’s graduation, the local newspaper featured a story titled Housing Slump? Not in Kearney. The front page article then proceeded to report that sales are up in this university town of 25,000 people. Not only that, prices are up, about $10,000 (~8%) on the average home over the last year.

Houses in Kearney are selling more quickly as well, in an average of 83 days in 2008 compared to 113 days last year. Local realtor board president Steve Coram was indignant, making it clear that there’s no such thing as a national real estate market. “Local economies drive real estate, so our market should not be judged based on what’s happening somewhere else” he said.

I’m prone to spout generalizations as much as the next person, but why must the national media insist on making such broad and inaccurate, or at the least incomplete, statements? This kind of reporting feeds an unwanted hysteria that births self-fulfilling prophecies. ABC World News, in my experience, isn’t averse to reporting on positive and less sensational items. Why then don’t they, along with other national media outlets (NPR, as I recall, is just as guilty on this particular issue), talk about this real estate mess on balanced terms? If this one somewhat innocuous midwestern housing market is bucking the mortgage mess in the larger markets, surely there are other such communities as well.

And isn’t it more interesting news to talk about the fish that swim upstream anyway?

I understand that evening news programs on television have very limited airtime, but they can do better than this. They need to do better than this.

This post elaborates on the link I posted two days ago to a CNN.com story titled Is America’s suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare? I’m going to look in particular at how the article relates to little Siloam Springs.

Change is knocking down the door and it’s for the best. According to Brookings Institution fellow Christopher Leinberger, “35% of the nation’s wealth has been invested in constructing this drivable suburban landscape.” I’d like to know how and where he gets this information (I’m always very skeptical about statistics), but it’s easy for me to believe.

The article goes on to cite “recent market research” that indicates 40% of households in metropolitan areas want to live in walkable places. Real estate in such areas is 40-200% higher than traditional suburban neighborhoods.

In my mind these trends come back to — whether this is collectively conscious or subconscious — two things. One relates to the unsustainability of the suburban landscape in its present form, the other to lack of community between the two environments.

Suburbia was created around the idea of the personal automobile. As I’ve said already this year, cars aren’t in and of themselves a bad thing; over-reliance on them is. Building cities to accommodate cars instead of people is a bad thing. Our car-culture contributes to laziness and health problems that previous generations weren’t familiar with. An auto-slash-petroleum based suburbia just isn’t sustainable.

Nor is it desirable. It’s just too easy to pull into your attached garage after a long, mostly sedentary day at the bureaucracy, pick up the battery operated hand and finger exercise machine (aka “remote”) and hunker down like a recluse. And even if we do go outside, we hide behind our privacy fences. I know this is an oversimplification, but it’s partly true. This isolation is a bad thing.

Siloam Springs isn’t exactly the stereotypical vision of American suburbia. There are some newer subdivisions on the outskirts of the community that look like typical suburban neighborhoods, but most of the 14,000 people live near enough to the center of town, to historical areas, that it’s hard to think of it in such terms.

The problem is that the center of town doesn’t function like the center of town anymore. I live in a very central location, but basic services are just a little outside of walking distance. To the south. The center is east of my house. The post office and two grocers (to the south) are just beyond a ten minute stroll, but they themselves are another ten minutes apart. They should be next to each other. And for anyone who lives farther north in Siloam Springs than I do — which is a lot of people — walking to any grocery store or the post office could end up taking a quarter of a day. Most of the city’s services are located, in typical suburban fashion, along the highway which runs through town.

I’m not certain of how many years Siloam has officially employed a city planner. Right now they have two. I’m guessing the city planning commission is an older institution in the community, which is made up of interested citizens, none of whom (as far as I know) possess any education in how to guide a city in its growth (or shrinkage). Regardless, the past officeholders would have done best to plan into the future, setting aside certain spaces for commercial and retail use to be surrounded by residential areas — and parks. For a ville like Siloam Springs, of 14,000 people at current density levels, I’m guessing three such nodes would suffice.

That’s if the planning commission had wooed development into a well-structured pattern. It’s much more difficult and expensive to change a city’s landscape after it’s been built, but what would it look like if Siloam Springs wanted to redesign itself, turn itself into a walkable, less car-dependent and more beautiful, therefore, community?

Making Siloam’s residential population more compact is probably not a realistic option at this point. An easier idea, it seems to me, would be moving existing businesses into newly designed nodes. Under present circumstances, four or five such commercial/retail spaces should suffice, each located in a different sector of town. Each such district should include a number of basic services. Were I to, off-hand, follow this line of thinking, I might center three nodes around existing grocers: Wal-Mart on the east side, IGA in the middle and Price Cutter on the west side. This still leaves a large part of the population on the north side unserviced, however. A decent place for a new hub on this side of town might be at Hico and Cheri Whitlock.

All of this wrangling over nodes and hubs is useless, though, if there aren’t sidewalks and trails leading to them. Siloam Springs has dropped the ball in the sidewalk department. I have friends within three blocks of the IGA who are scared to walk over there with their young children in tow because there are no sidewalks, and the roads are narrow besides. What an insane waste to drive three blocks when you don’t have to!

Even if ideas like the one I’ve just proposed are easier than complete upheaval in a community (i.e. residential rearrangement), they are still complicated, drawn out and expensive. People in town become very defensive when these kinds of proposals start flying around. I’m convinced, though, that changes like the ones I’ve brainstormed here will only improve the community.

Siloam Springs just released their 2030 plan in March. I haven’t looked over it yet, and even though I have faith in our long-term planner, Ben Rhodes, I’m not sure I’ll like what I see in the plan. A lot of planning is taking into account what those pesky residents suggest, or deter. Ben and I might want something very different from a lot of people in town. And a lot of the more powerful people in town are more likely to be “established,” and “established” citizens are stereotypically against change of most any kind.

And then there are the politics of such things.

The dream of white picket fences is turning into a suburban nightmare as a result of the sub-prime mortgage scandal. McMansions may soon morph into apartment buildings. The face of suburbia is changing, as is the American dream. Younger generations, this CNN story reminds us, are opting for New Urbanism. I’ll elaborate on this in a later post. Via the Wolfeden.

Green Inventions Central explores the idea of meals and liturgy. She looks at two books in her post, Margaret Peterson’s Keeping House and Mark Galli’s Beyond Smells and Bells: The wonder and power of Christian liturgy. From Peterson’s book:

In the modern American culture, in which ‘busyness’ can seem simultaneously like the badge of a good life and like a curse that is impossible to escape, finding time to eat or to feed others can become a challenge. People eat on the run; they feed their children in the car; they skip breakfast, eat lunch at their desks, and panic when it is dinnertime.

She contrasts this with Galli’s classification of Sunday morning services — “gathering, word, sacrament, dismissal” — and seeks to apply Sunday liturgy to the evening dinner table.

Bob Barker is at odds with Iraqi culture. Neutering dogs is a foreign idea to people in Baghdad, where veterinarians are more like matchmakers than caretakers.

Hypermilers miss the point. Some do it for environmental reasons, others to protect the pocketbook. Regardless, if they are really worried about either of these things they will seriously consider — and if at all possible apply — lifestyle changes. That is, they will move closer to work, walk, bike or even buy a scooter. They don’t have to get rid of their cars altogether, but the extremes they are going to, some of them, merely dance around the issues.

The Vatican is looking for new artists. The Roman Catholic church is trying to recruit new artists “In an attempt to ‘lead by example.’” Their Council for Culture is setting up a committee “to find ‘world-famous’ contemporary artists it can commission to produce new religious and spiritual works.” Via Iconia.

Save yourself from MySpace. A new Firefox add-on warns you if you’re about to navigate onto a MySpace page. Too funny. Via TechCrunch.

Carfree Tokyo linked back to me and reminded me of this James Kunstler podcast, The Tragedy of Suburbia, which I mentioned in March. I re-watched it today and thought this quote was worth sharing:

This [slide] happens to be the asteroid belt of architectural garbage two miles north of my town, and remember, to create a place of character and quality, you have to be able to define space. So how is that being accomplished here? If you stand on the apron of the Wal-Mart over here, and try to look at the Target store over here, you can’t see it because of the curvature of the Earth. That’s nature’s way of telling you that you’re doing a poor job of defining space.

Emphasis mine. I laughed out loud at the asteroid and Earth curvature commentary. Kunstler lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

The price of gas seems to have become reasonable filler for news reports. The following are a few observations from these reports.

* Ridership on public transit is going up, up, up.
* Sales of scooters are on the rise.
* A California man decided to bike 42 miles one way to work for a month — partly because he’d always wanted to, but in the process he’s saving about $400.
* One investigative story found that the price of fuel is artificially high. Yes, there is more demand than ever worldwide, but what Americans are paying now is more a function of other bureaucratic and speculative nuances than simple supply and demand.
* GM is closing four manufacturing facilities, all ones that produce large vehicles. And, heaven forbid, they may also discontinue the conspicuous Hummer.

In April I asked “Will the financial strain actually change the way we live?” So it seems the painful price of petrol is forcing people to make adjustments, positive adjustments. My next question is, then, will this change be long-lasting? If the price of gas returns to the low *cough* neighborhood of $2.00/gallon, will Americans stick with the changes they made when costs were high? Will those who moved closer to work move back to the burbs? Will trains and buses have empty seats again? Will General Motors bring back the big cars?

The prices don’t effect my wife and I quite as much as some. I already bike to work whenever I can — because I like to — and the drive from home to office is barely a mile as it is. This whole ordeal interests me, instead, because of its relationship to how we live and design/build our communities in the United States. I would love to see a cultural shift take place. If the cost of gas is the impetus for this change, great. I’m convinced that a pedestrian/transit oriented culture is better for community and also better for the visual environment. I don’t expect cars to go away; they are a useful technology. But they are also overused in our culture, so much so that they have, in essence, taken over.

A few past posts on petrol pain from The Aesthetic Elevator:

Will costs really force a change?
Gas prices cause Dallasite to move
Ethanol a Symptom: Get to the root cause

I haven’t written about Siloam Springs, the humble little community I reside in presently, in a while now. I’ve been waiting for a few projects downtown to come to completion. Two of these projects in question are now finished, so I’m sharing some photos of what’s happening on Broadway.

The fountain was just rebuilt. There is a bronze sculpture of a bird on the top that isn’t really visible against the trees; if I weren’t so tired this week I might have looked twice and moved three steps to the right so the bird was against the blue of the sky. Oh well.

A partnership between a local family, two brothers, and Drake Renovations — formerly DRC — is revitalizing downtown architecture. The brothers are funding the effort to bring a number of buildings back to life. The first of these projects to be finished was the small bookstore in the middle of the following photograph. This building used to be home to Savage Art. Ron Drake is on the left in the blue shirt, owner of Drake Renovations. The other two standing with him are part of the funding family.

Following are a few links to past posts about Siloam Springs’ downtown:

Downtown Siloam’s new details
Spurs for Siloam Springs
Downtown Siloam and DRC

RelieveDebtor over at Architecture + Morality posted a thoroughly captivating article today titled Beauty and Waste: More thoughts on space and worship. He starts off by citing the challah. Customarily, Jewish bread bakers would tear off a small portion of their dough as a tithe — the challah — either to throw away or give to the priests. Apparently the tradition continues today, acting as a reminder that God provides all that is needed.

The author then begins talking about such a practice in relationship to our sometimes overly conservative and efficient American culture, a culture typically averse to waste. I often lament the wastefulness of America, as indicated by this blog’s category called “Disposable culture.” But RelieveDebtor has a good point, and the waste he refers to isn’t exactly in the same vein as what I decry on The Aesthetic Elevator.

The blog entry then dives into how this relates to church architecture. The writer asks:

But how can you convince someone that it might be worth creating a space that’s less than efficient, and that might take years to complete, not months? I could certainly quote scripture, where Jesus defends a woman who cleans his feet with costly nard. Surely this text allows the Church to be “wasteful” when it comes to adoring Christ.

This is a wonderful point with respect to the approach to the arts found in many or most modern Protestant minds. Church buildings are treated as — and I’ve said this numerous times before — purely functional, with white steeples thrown on top for good measure. I commonly liken most new places of worship to the visual marriage of a warehouse and an office building. How does such an aesthetic aid in drawing a visitor into reverent adoration of the one true, Holy God? Should a space designed and built for such a purpose be visually the same as, and therefore elicit the same psychological response as the places we work? Should the buildings in our communities labeled as places where Christ-followers gather and praise look the same as the city hall or a lawyer’s office?

The post goes on to say that “Instead of offering beauty and mystery to its congregants, it replaces those needs with an emotional experience and preaching that promises certainty . . . In other words, the space need not communicate.” Instead, we’ll do all the talking, and lots of talking the writer suggests.

More or less I agree with everything in the text from the Architecture + Morality post, including the conclusion which suggests the best solution is a balance between erecting beautiful buildings and keeping costs at a reasonable level. Lovely buildings, it’s cautioned, do not replace true worship.

The only other thing I can add is a personal anecdote about the church I’ve attended for the past four years now. This church owned land for a new building, but instead opted to purchase a vacant warehouse in town which would offer more space for the money. The warehouse, not surprisingly, looks like a warehouse. Even after the renovation. This probably saved the congregation some cash, but it also did well to further it’s philosophy in how it interacts with the community. And while the author of the Beauty and Waste article bemoans such spaces as places of worship, I would argue that the church actually did the visual environment a favor. How long would the old furniture store sit vacant, an eyesore in the city, if the church hadn’t bought it? The paint would fade in the sun and weeds would take over the empty parking lot. Instead, the building is now used and kept up. (Yes, I would personally prefer a very different space to worship in than a converted furniture warehouse, but life isn’t perfect.)

RelieveDebtor concludes with this:

Or in other words, there are ways in which we worship beyond our feelings and our words; prayers in stone matter, too. Indeed they stand apart from a world that is looking more and more monolithic, where big box churches, malls and retail stores blend together all too seamlessly. Funny that when the architecture blends together, so too does the music, theology, and driving motivations for even existing.