On suburbia and sustainability 27 May 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Community planning, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Furniture, Modern culture, Sustainable living.2 comments
The Passionately Alive entry I already cited this morning also contains two very interesting bits of media talking about suburbia and sustainability that are worth resposting. First, a trailer for The End of Suburbia:
And secondly, an excerpt from The Suburban Nation (pages 117-118):
The plight of the suburban housewife was powerfully conveyed in a letter we received in 1990 from a woman living outside of Tulsa:
Dear Architects:
I am a mother of four children who are not able to leave the yard because of our city’s design. Ever since we have moved here I have felt like a caged animal only let out for a ride in the car. It is impossible to walk even to the grocery store two blocks away. If our family wants to go for a ride we need to load two cars with four bikes and a baby cart and drive four miles to the only bike path in this city of over a quarter million people. I cannot exercise unless I drive to a health club that I had to pay $300 to, and that is four and a half miles away. There is no sense of community here on my street, either, because we all have to drive around in our own little worlds that take us fifty miles a day to every corner of the surrounding five miles.
I want to walk somewhere so badly that I could cry. I miss walking! I want the kids to walk to school. I want to walk to the store for a pound of butter. I want to take the kids on a neighborhood stroll or bike. My husband wants to walk to work because it is so close, but none of these things is possible…And if you saw my neighborhood, you would think that I had it all according to the great American dream.
The mathematics of beauty 23 February 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Art, Basis for designing well, Beauty, Design, Furniture.3 comments
Sebastian Smee of the Boston Globe penned a very interesting profile this weekend on one Horace Brock, an imposing man with five degrees under his belt including classical music, mathematics and economics.
Brock claims to have discovered a formula for beauty. From the article:
What about this theory, then?
In truth, it’s satisfyingly simple. Designed objects, Brock writes, can be broken down into “themes” and “transformations.” A theme is a motif, such as an S-curve; a transformation might see that curve appear elsewhere in the design, but stretched, rotated 90 degrees, mirrored, or otherwise reworked . . .
Brock wants to be clear that his theory applies only to beauty in design – in other words, architecture, furniture, and other kinds of decorative art: “That’s very important – I wouldn’t want to claim too much.” But in his catalog essay he claims his account “makes it possible to clarify, and indeed to quantify, one of the deepest principles of aesthetics: People . . . tend to be bored if there is too much simplicity (the kitchen chair, certain Gregorian chants) and overwhelmed if there is too much complexity (pastiche Victorian furniture, much 20th-century classical music).”
In his estimation, the theory also subsumes most previous theories of beauty in design – from Pythagoras’s golden rectangle to Hogarth’s “line of beauty,” from the celebrated golden section to the Fibonacci series – into a neat mathematical equation.
Smee probes a little and questions whether beauty can be reduced so simplistically to an equation. Brock is absolute in his response to the idea that beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder, “It’s absolute crap.”
A man after my own heart. Read the article in its entirety here.
Art gallery grand opening in Siloam Springs 6 February 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Business of art, Community planning, Furniture, New Urbanism, Northwest Arkansas, Siloam Springs.4 comments
It’s been a week of short posts, and here’s another.
Tonight is the grand opening of the Local Flair Art Gallery in downtown Siloam Springs from 6-9pm. The downtown gallery features two and three-dimensional works by 10 or 12 local artists including Joel Armstrong, Charles Peer, Neil Ward, John Lein and myself.
This is a significant step in the revival of downtown Siloam Springs. Another such step is getting a restaurant down there, which seems to be happening in the next six months as well. Emelia’s Mediterranean Kitchen is supposed to going into the dilapidated building on the corner of Mount Olive and University.
Other recently new retail downtown includes a Books on Broadway, Broadway Flowers and The Baby Habit. And, in conjunction with Local Flair, a furniture boutique is opening next door called Amandromeda. Amandromeda’s growing collection includes seating designed by both a Bertoia and Le Corbusier. The interior of the store below.
Another downtown building is also receiving a makeover now, although I’m not sure what’s going in it. It was formerly Felt’s Shoes before recently being used as storage by now mayor David Allen. Apartments continue to go in the second floors of two or three buildings as well.
Now we just have to hope these new businesses find some staying power.
Entropy, patina, the built environment 8 August 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Architecture, Basis for designing well, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Found objects, Furniture, Handmade, Sustainable living.3 comments
I’ve cited Alain de Botton’s book The Architecture of Happiness a few times on The Aesthetic Elevator now after hearing him talk on NPR a couple years ago, particularly with respect to personal aesthetics. Last month I purchased the book as part of our anniversary celebration, and began reading it this week. Botton isn’t an architect — he’s a writer — but his observations on aesthetics and how the built environment plays into our everyday lives appear sound from the little I know so far.
Last night I read a paragraph from the book that said this:
When we have attained our [architectural] goals, our buildings have a grievous tendency to fall apart again with precipitate speed. It can be hard to walk into a freshly decorated house without feeling pre-emptively sad at the decay impatiently waiting to begin: how soon the walls will crack, the white cupboards will yellow and the carpets stain. The ruins of the Ancient World offer a mocking lesson for anyone waiting for builders to finish their work. How proud the householders of Pompeii must have been.
The idea of entropy, things falling apart, makes tangential appearances in my artwork and philosophy from time to time. This is especially true when I’m thinking about and employing found objects. It’s an interesting point Botton makes in the quote, but I’d like to counter it with something he didn’t mention (maybe it’s brought up later in the book, but I wouldn’t know about that yet).
Yes, all things tend towards disorder, disintegration. I have a sense, even, that American environments (Botton is a Swiss born Brit) tend to appear more disintegrated than some others. We’re a youthful country of efficiency, efficiency on the front end. We want it and we want it now, and who cares what happens over time with whatever it is. In other words, it’s more important to have the house now than to wait five years and save enough money so that it can be built well. It’s more important to stand in line for half a day to purchase an iPhone than wait for a later model where the bugs will be worked out. You get catch my drift.
Our built environment often reflects our myopic culture. We build cheaply with cheap materials in a lot of cases, figuring we’ll just demolish and rebuild on the same plot when we need to. It’s good for the economy, right? The builders have work, the demolition crews get paid and the garbage men have truckloads of debris to carry to the landfills.
What if we were to take a little more time and spend a little more money building our cities, using more enduring materials. Yes, entropy will still take hold, but there are ways we can guide it to our aesthetic advantage. Stone, concrete and clay (brick) will last a long time if properly put together and cared for. Sure, they might take more energy to produce in the short-term, but they’ll also be around a lot longer than most stick framed houses which makes them a sustainable choice as well as an aesthetic one.
The above photograph demonstrates the kind of patina age can give to certain materials, a beautiful patina that modern homeowners try and replicate. The color of durable woods — by durable I mean harder woods that stand up to rot and termites better than pine or fir — is also very agreeable with age. I plan to create a dining room table out of old hard oak salvaged from a remodel job I worked on three years ago. Some of the rough cut boards are quarter sawn and others plain sawn, they vary in color and are full of little nail holes, but the finished product will be gorgeous if I can pull it off.
My point is that age, decay, in certain materials doesn’t have to be an exclusively sad event, and in fact can be cause for rejoicing. The concrete block patio in my backyard is far more interesting now that it has a few more years under its belt. The stains and moss give the surface a visual depth that new concrete just doesn’t have. Further, it’s just as strong as when it was new; recalling my strengths of materials course in college, concrete actually hardens as it ages.
Photo from Wikipedia
Catching up 10 May 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Furniture, Painting, Personal reflection.add a comment
Been out of town the past ten plus days, hence the lack of new material here. Attended my brother’s wedding and sister’s graduation. Here are a couple of photos representative of the trip:
Not one that he’s most proud of, but a nice touch.
to use as a small store.
We drive home tomorrow and I’m glad there’s nothing travel-related on the schedule at this point until December. It’s been a very busy Spring.
Design/make on demand 30 April 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Basis for designing well, Business of art, Design, Environmental stewardship, Furniture.add a comment
I just learned of San Francisco startup Ponoko via TechCrunch. I’m still trying to understand the details, but the concept rocks.
From what I can tell so far this is the premise. Upload your design for a product and Ponoko, which has a factory in San Francisco, will make it for you. You can sell your blueprints for other people to make and can also use the website to market your designs, which Ponoko will build and ship to you to ship to the purchaser — at least that’s how I’ve understood the process up to this point. The home page of their website shows links that direct to Your own personal factory (”How to make”) or and an Online showroom (”How to sell”).
They claim the process of on demand creation will cut down on the waste of overproduction, and also grants the desires of shoppers who may not find exactly what they are after in the aisles of big box retailers, lined with mass produced products. A service definitely worth checking out. I might try it out and see if I can’t successful plug my table design which I referred to earlier this week.
In the Studio: 28 April 28 April 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Furniture, Interior design, Northwest Arkansas.3 comments
Not ceramics or sculpture this time, but furniture. My brother asked me to build a bed; he gets married this coming weekend. As a wedding gift I’m throwing in some side tables to match.
I like building furniture, but don’t make a habit of it since I really don’t have the necessary space or tools. I have friends with table-saws, but my garage is narrow and the ceiling short. Somehow I manage, but the tables above aren’t as square as I’d like. The door I’m currently using as my workbench top is anything but level. For clay this is fine; not so much for building beds. Of course, only I, the builder, will ever notice such details.
This is soft maple, which I haven’t used before — at least not on this scale. It responds pretty nicely to the tools, but I’m learning it doesn’t take stain very well. This has become problematic as my brother and his fiance are adamant about a dark stain. It was hard enough to find maple in the first place. They would have been OK with another wood, but I kept looking and finally found a place here in Northwest Arkansas that sells hardwoods other than oak and poplar. So I ran with the maple.
The other trick will be transporting it to Nebraska, where the wedding is and bride and groom reside. The pieces should just fit in our Camry wagon as I’ve measured. But paying for shipping didn’t seem like a reasonable option in this case.
I like my design for the side tables. The small shelf underneath the top acts to reinforce the legs, and essentially “floats” in notches I carved by hand. The hand-carving went really well, much better than in the past thanks to some better tools and more experience under my belt. I also mortised and tenonned the legs and footboard more or less by hand. I like working when I can without the aid of powered machines. I don’t have anything against a table saw or drill press (both of which I’ve used for this project), but there is something much more rewarding about taking a chisel and mallet in your hands and working the wood.
The tops of the table, as well as the stone detail in the center stile of the headboard as pictured above, will be travertine marble.
Disposable day 31 March 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Basis for designing well, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Furniture, Salvage, Siloam Springs, Sustainable living.1 comment so far
Today is one of two weeks of cleanup performed by the city in Siloam Springs. Place anything you want to dispose of by the road and by Friday it is supposed to have disappeared, carried off either by the official crane-truck or by citizens hunting for treasures.
And there are some treasures. Two houses down from my own were two pieces of furniture that caught my eye, one a decent looking table top. Both were gone within hours of being placed roadside. I didn’t even wander down to examine them after thinking about the storage nightmare they would create — this on a weekend I spent cleaning and organizing. In fact the pile in front of that particular house dwindled down to almost nothing before being restocked this morning with a beastly, legless pool table among other odds and ends.
This post, however, refers to the darker side of the twice annual junk-fest. I couldn’t help but think of the wasteful society we live in as I passed by pile after pile of stuff. Regular readers know this rant already. In our mass-producing, mass-consuming culture little consideration is given to how many of these trinkets will end up in landfills. With the environmental movements of recent years this is changing to a degree, but very slowly.
Take the chair in the above photograph for instance. We’ll ignore its lack of aesthetic appeal in this particular dialogue. First off it’s not in that bad of shape. Why is it being thrown away; did the owners trade up? The dog got a hold of one corner and the fabric is a bit faded, but most college students would love to have this in their dorm room. So it might be missing its feet; what are bricks and two-by-fours for!
I can imagine, just by the looks of it, that is a cheap chair — like so much factory fare in our day and age. The company’s bottom line drives design and choice of materials. Everything has to be as inexpensive as possible in order to maximize profits to pad the CEO’s bonus and keep the shareholders happy. Further, the shorter the life-span of a gadget or appliance the sooner it will need to be replaced, thereby ensuring future sales for the company — so long as they can create brand loyalty and/or attract new buyers.
Can’t companies come up with ways to create more enduring products and still make money (Or do we first need to get them to agree to make less money?). Do consumers need to be convinced it’s worth it to spend a little more for a chair or dining room table (or house, for that matter) that possesses some staying power?
Handmade furniture 20 February 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Craft, Disposable culture, Furniture, Handmade, Interior design.add a comment
I happened upon the website of woodworker J. Alexander this morning and thought it warranted props and a link. Basically, the guy builds custom furniture. Here’s a screenshot from his gallery:
What I found noteworthy on this website were a couple of blurbs on the information page, speaking to our generally bland, homogenous, mass-produced visual culture:
Finishing Process
The finishing process is what makes a custom piece of furniture really stand out from its mass produced counterpart. There are no short-cuts around here. Each item is painstakingly finished to accentuate the beauty of the wood and ensure its overall durability.
Cost
Custom furniture is of course more expensive than a lower-end mass produced item, but when compared to high-end brands such as Ethan Allen, Thomasville, and others, my prices are usually very competitive. On top of that, your funiture will have been painstakingly created by hand by a local craftsman.
Kudos to the handmade, to enduring functional (and/or decorative) objects worth keeping around for generations. My great grandfather built two library tables — among many other objects — during his lifetime, either of which I’m sure anyone in my family would love to end up with one day. He crafted a base for one; for the other, my grandfather — his son — hand-carved legs in the shape of elephant heads, the trunks supporting the tabletop, a few years back. Both are beautifully and intricately inlaid, the one in my father’s possession having as a focal point a detailed rose.
Furniture Design: A beautiful buffet and my sanity 27 August 2007
Posted by pcNielsen in Beauty, Design, Furniture, Handmade, Intentional observation, Interior design, Northwest Arkansas, Personal reflection, Restoration, Salvage, Siloam Springs.3 comments
A few weeks ago I realized something. I’m passionate about living spaces. This isn’t really a revelation. What it is is a succinct way to describe how I’m wired. I’ve been interested in residential architecture since I was twelve years old. This new phrase, however, causes me to think differently about choices I’ve made in the past and will make in the future.
I had coffee with Joel Armstrong this morning. Afterwards we put my bike in his van and drove to his house to pick through the treasures in his garage. From there we drove back towards my place. This is where the story gets interesting — and where it relates to my passion for home interiors.
If I were driving we would have turned down Jefferson to get home. Joel stuck to Main Street, which is not really much slower. Main goes through downtown. It goes right by the Siloam Springs building I spoke of a few weeks ago.
When I looked at the building with a realtor two years ago I saw a piece of furniture, an antique buffet. The buffet stood out in the dusty unfinished second floor space. I almost called the owners and asked if I could have it. I regret not doing that. I told my friend who has a contract on the building I wanted it and he said sure, although neither of us knew if it would still be there when he signed the papers.
So Joel and I drove by said building on Saturday. A sign on the window said “free stuff.” We like free stuff (and I knew the buffet might be in there) so we stopped. We wandered into the building and another “customer” pointed out who was in charge. Just as I was about to get the opportunity to talk to the owners, the ones giving the stuff away, the lady right in front of me found one of the doors from the buffet in a pile of stuff. She asked the owner what the door went with and when the owner pointed to the glorious buffet the lady was almost giddy. And claimed it immediately.
The buffet was in better shape than I remembered (other than one of the four curved doors being off of it). It’s about 40 inches tall. I failed to note the flavor of the exterior veneers, but the inside of the doors were birds-eye maple. It boasted clean shelving and built-in drawers for, I assume, silver. Some of the inlay on the outside of the doors needed attention, but I happen to know that the claimer’s husband is a cabinet maker with an enviable wood shop. This same claimer also goes to my church and lives immediately next door to good friends of mine.
Even after she claimed the majestic piece I asked the building owners where it came from. They said it was left by a tenant who couldn’t pay rent. That tenant was apparently a nephew of the late Wal-Mart heiress Helen Walton. History like this adds incredible value to such an antique, although had I been able to take the thing home I would have kept it. I gave this piece of information to the claimer on our way out of the building, infusing her with another round of giddiness. She hurried back into the building to ask more about the history after calling her husband and telling him to “Come now! Bring truck!”.
If I would have stepped into the building 60 seconds earlier the buffet would have been mine. The claimer said she was willing to wrestle for it. I should have taken her up on this offer.
Of course, it seemed we were a couple minutes too late for any of the good stuff. There were two other interesting pieces of furniture — one a disassembled wardrobe as beautiful as the buffet — that the other couple milling around in the junk already claimed. As it was the building owners (reputed in town for their apparent unwillingness to keep up or sell at reasonable prices the many downtown buildings they own) hadn’t even decided amongst themselves what they were giving away or keeping. The one other thing I really wanted, a little balance scale, they decided they were keeping. I would have used the scale for weighing out materials in glaze-making. I went home with a couple antique-y things for my dad, hardly qualifying as any kind of consolation prize.
Is it insane to obsess so much over a dusty old piece of furniture? I spent the next few hours thinking about this whole scenario. First of all I wondered why God, in whom I believe strongly and trust to take care of me (even if this is in ways I don’t understand), would allow me to even see the “free stuff” sign. Why did He pick this Saturday for Joel to insist I go back to his house? Why didn’t I suggest Joel take Jefferson instead of letting him keep driving down Main Street? If we wouldn’t have seen the sign I would never have known what I missed out on, that I was less than a minute from getting this wonderful piece of furniture for free, a piece of furniture I had longed for for two years or more. I would have assumed, after my friend signs the contract on the building in September, that the owners took it with them. It was never guaranteed that I would get it.
And it would have been less torment if we arrived at the building later, after the claimer drove off with the buffet. The claimer who I will now see every week at church, reminding me of my loss. It says in the Bible, in the book of James, that we are to rejoice in tribulation. For me this is tribulation.
I hope I came across as civilized to the claimer. I didn’t take her up on her wrestling challenge. I tried to say encouraging things, although I can’t remember exactly how any of them came out. I remember saying something like, “Well, I’m glad there are other people in Siloam with such good taste.” I’m not sure if this came out in a positive or negative way to the hearers. I did call my friend, the claimer’s neighbor, and suggest he go next door and lust after the beautiful object (said mostly in jest, of course). My friend didn’t do this, which I suppose I should be thankful for.
Part of my interest probably stems from being a dumpster-diver, from my keen interest in salvage and restoration. This was a find, an incredible find. And the claimer knew it. And I’m sincerely happy for her. I’m just quite sad for myself. And my wife, who was with me when we saw the buffet two years ago, is almost as sad.
What will I learn from this experience? Am I supposed to learn something, or am I just supposed to give grace which in turn will make God look good — which I’m perfectly OK with and which God deserves from us. Or maybe I was supposed to wrestle this woman, probably only five years older than me (roughly). Maybe my wrestling her for this beautiful piece of furniture would be kind of like Jesus’ anger at the vendors in the Temple. After all, I do believe that my passionate interest in beautiful, tactile things is a gift from God.
I know, I know, that last one is more than a little bit of a stretch. Truth is I have know idea why God allowed this to happen in my life. I may never know.
Part of the humor in the whole adventure was that Joel didn’t come away with much free stuff either, and he’s as much of a salvage monkey as I am. He kept asking for the junkiest and most obscure little items — an old sign, spools of wire — which the owners of the building decided on the spot they were keeping. Old, half-used spools of steel wire they keep, and significant, wondermous antique furniture formerly owned by the Walton family they give away! How incredibly strange this seems to me!
I know that I will look back on the morning and laugh.
Once I get over my insane sadness. Once I stop kicking myself for not being more aggressive, for not walking into the building and yelling “Where’s the buffet that used to be upstairs? I want it!” which, my wife will tell you, isn’t all that much out of character for me.
