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.

I’ve been fascinated with various forms of large-scale transportation since I was very young. I grew up in a non-descript western Nebraska community that boasts the worlds largest rail classification yards. And after my first time flying — first time old enough to remember, anyway — I became infatuated with commercial aviation. Any time an airplane, small props such as the Beechcraft 1900 in the case of the North Platte airport, flew within hearing I would look up. Thankfully this wasn’t very often in the small town, or I might have acquired a permanent crick in my neck. More reflection on my interest in aviation is in this post from June of last year.

I don’t fly all that much, but in the last five weeks I set foot in airports for two separate trips. My layover was in Memphis in both cases. The Memphis airport is a dreary place to be (the one point of promise was the real-live art hanging on the walls). In the concourses ceilings are low, corridors are narrow and the tiled walls are a drab brown-gray. It may be the ugliest airport I’ve been in.

But a lot of airports look like this, bland and uninviting. Situation Terminal, from The New Yorker’s website, tackles the question “Can anyone design a nice aiport?” The story lays out a bit of airport design history, suggesting the logistical nightmare that is a large airport and tight finances fostered a more or less pragmatic approach to terminal and concourse design in the last thirty to forty years. Attempts at reinventing the airport were, while perhaps visually interesting, failures in function. The New Yorker cites Eero Saarinen’s efforts at JFK and Dulles in this regard.

“Since then,” the story says, “airport authorities have been wary of letting any architect have a say on what should go where. Now most architects don’t get to do much more than give the main concourse a big, swooping space with natural light — like the one in the new American Airlines terminal at Kennedy airport — which acts as little more than a distraction from the banality of the rest of the terminal.”

There are, however, two shining examples of a better way to design airports according to columnist Paul Goldberger. Norman Foster’s Beijing Capital International Airport’s Terminal 3 is the airport rethought, successfully according to Goldberger. Apparently the space is intuitive and logistically more sound than the comfortable — even if archaic — model airports presently defer to.

I’m not so keen on the aesthetics from what I can tell in the architects renderings, though, or the 500+ photos uploaded to Flickr. It looks like a very large commercial building, like so many other airports, from what I can tell. Sure, it appears as though the architect specified some attempts to cover up the generally cold underlying structure, but based on the images I’m finding online the attempt was futile. The one exception is the Ground Transportation Centre. This space actually looks pleasant to be in.

The second example of a new airport architecture Goldberger’s piece cites is Terminal 4 in Madrid. The column doesn’t say much about function in Richard Roger’s Barajas Airport project, but the images lend me to believe this is, overall, a much more inviting environment than Terminal 3 in Beijing.

My own experience lies more with smaller venues, such as the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport (XNA) or Lincoln [Nebraska] Airport (LNK). In many ways these smaller airports are much nicer to fly in and out of, even if there aren’t as many restaurants to choose from. I often wonder if the hub and spoke system major airlines use to get people from place to place is less than optimal. I suppose — that is, I hope — the airlines have seriously considered alternatives to this model at some point in their history. With all of the financial trouble most of them are in right now, one would think this might be a good time to revisit a variety of innovative options in order to say afloat and gain and edge on the competition.

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?

I must admit that I’m not all that into Sunday morning church services these days. So when a series of Powerpoint slides (yay) began to play in front of the congregation yesterday, I only paid half attention — at best.

The slides, as I recall, exhorted people in the pews to give something to God during the service, not expect something from it. In other words, don’t complain about the music or the color of the carpet; just sing and pray and give back to God.

Of course, I may be butchering the meaning of the slideshow — only paying half-attention and all — but that’s beside that point here. The point here is the thought that struck me towards the end of the announcement: “What if there’s something to people’s expressed (or unexpressed) distaste for certain aspects of a church service or building?”

What if such complaints are an affirmation of the importance of beauty, of aesthetics?

Generally speaking, I don’t condone church-hopping on account of ugly carpet or even redundant praise and worship music (a pet peeve of mine); as we all know thanks to countless email forwards laden with Christianese, “There’s no such thing as a perfect church.” But the fact is that our environment does influence us and music is an enigmatically powerful art. The fact also remains that different people will always own different aesthetics, and attempting to satisfy all at the same time is unrealistic.

How do we reconcile or approach personal aesthetics within a community setting such as a church? Perhaps we poll people:

Circle the color of carpet you prefer:

Navy
Aqua
0000FF
Turquoise
Royal blue
Cornflower blue

I’ve quoted Architect Daniel Lee before, and I’ll do it again here:

“It is possible to worship God in a gymnasium or lecture hall, because if people are truly seeking him, God will meet them there. But to worship in such architecture is to suggest that our purpose is either recreational or cerebral. We should build spaces crafted specially for a human-divine encounter with God.”

Or, it seems to me, perhaps we shouldn’t build sacred spaces at all. New Testament instruction dictates that we as Christ-followers regularly assemble. It doesn’t say where or how often or how many songs to sing — or necessarily to sing at all — to my knowledge.

Adding: As smitten as I am with the idea of house churches, my interest in the visual environment and architecture supersedes my suggestion that we forgo church buildings altogether. I believe they can, in appropriate cultural context, serve as a witness to the surrounding community as well as significantly encouraging — if well-considered — meditation and communion with our Holy God.

I learned this weekend that my father finally has a closing date for a building in downtown Grand Island, Nebraska. He’s been looking for a couple of years now. His original idea was to find a place with room for an apartment upstairs and store frontage downstairs. I mentioned his interest in downtown real estate in an August post as well (The building mentioned in that post, which he made an offer on, didn’t pan out.).

Without rehashing the myriad of details he considered while looking for a commercial property, I present to you the structure he finally has a contract on — the elegant building in the middle of the picture:

Amenities include marble stairways to the second floor from the street and alley, a bonafied civic shelter comprising 2/3rds of the basement (complete with thirty empty water barrels) and rental income totaling $900 per month. It seems his patience paid off as he found a building slightly under his budget. The drawback is that the store frontage is being used by one of the renters — who have three years left on their lease — so he will have to peddle his antiques from the second floor for the time being.

This post isn’t so much about this one building though as it is about the ruination of once stately downtowns in American communities. Compare the above photograph to the following historical photo of the original bank building:

The original facade is presently obscured by modern renovations allowing for two street level entries. These economy grade renovations seem to pay no attention to the well-crafted, elegant pilasters and cornice they so haphazardly obscure. The same goes for so many buildings in the area. Look in the first picture at the wild green building to the right of my father’s [future] property, and compare it to the same building in the second photo.

Ugh.

My complaint here is not so much a distinction between modern and more classically influenced architecture as it is a distinction between quality of craft and design. The modern overlays on these buildings look cheap, cheap in the sense of it’s not going to last. They also exhibit poor form in not paying respect to their surroundings. The bright green steel and glass structure seems to completely ignore the materials and colors around it, looking like a flakey marketing gimmick nestled among more serious contenders. One of the things that was made very clear during the two years I studied architecture in college was the importance of the plot. My professor went so far as to suggest we take our sleeping bags to the vacant lot assigned to us and spend the night there.

The modern iterations and modifications also seem to, largely, lack attention to detail. Sure, modern architecture is generally spare — indeed, often cold — in comparison to classical, but it doesn’t have to look like a shoebox with cutouts for doors and windows.

I’d like to help my dad take that stark tin awning off of his little building someday, and I hope the former glory of these buildings is still intact under their present clothing.

This sounds like a show I’d like to see:

The Christian Story: Five Asian Artists Today
The Christian Story features the paintings of five contemporary Asian artists: Nalini Jayasuriya (Sri Lanka); Sawai Chinnawong (Thailand); Nyoman Darsane (Bali); He Qi (China); and Wisnu Sasongko (Indonesia). While largely influenced by regional artistic and cultural traditions, their work is also informed by Western artistic traditions due in large part to the fact that many of the artists have been exposed in varying degrees to images from the canon of Judeo-Christian art.

He Qi, Losing Paradise, 2004.

Too bad I can’t just cut out this weekend and fly to New York. Well, I guess I could, but then I’d be in debt. My wife and I realized today that we missed the opening of the season’s first show at the JBU Gallery. This show apparently features vintage airline posters. Not as sad as missing out on the buffet, but still a bummer.

I’ve seen this brief note from Wired two or three times in the last week or so now:

“Blood-spurting martyrs, biblical parables, ascendant doves — most church windows feature the same preachy images that have awed parishioners for centuries. But a new stained-glass window in Germany’s Cologne Cathedral, to be completed in August, evokes technology and science, not religion and the divine. Contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter designed the 65-foot-tall work to replace the original, destroyed by bombs in World War II. As a starting point, he used his own 1974 painting 4096 Colors. To create that piece — a 64-by-64 grid of squares — Richter devised a mathematical formula to systematically mix permutations of the three primary colors and gray. Funny coincidence: 4,096 is also the number of “Web-smart” colors that display consistently on older computer screens, a limitation some Web designers still take into account. (Today’s monitors, of course, can handle pretty much any hue.) The Cologne window is made of 11,500 four-inch ” pixels” cut from original antique glass in a total of 72 colors. Why not 4,096? Turns out there are stained glass-smart colors, too. Some hues in Richter’s initial design were either historically inaccurate or too pale — they would have outshone the squares around them. So the artist modified his palette to include only colors with a suitably archaic cast. Because it’s fine for a church window to look like it’s been designed by a computer, as long as it’s a computer with a Gothic sensibility.”

It’s really difficult for me to imagine something like this. In recent years I’ve lamented the lack of stained glass — or any kind of significant, artistic, architectural aspect — in modern church buildings. A large church I attended before moving to Arkansas installed a fan-dangled stage lighting get-up, which I referred to as a poor replacement for stained glass. The blurry textures these lights beamed onto the walls did nothing, in my opinion, to enhance the space. Awe, reverence, worship was not heightened by a wall full of pixelated light.

I know nothing of Richter’s work. I am glad to see a church allowing a modern artist such freedom, but my own personal aversion to the ubiquitous digital presence in our cultures stirs up a mild disgust at this particular work.

I crave the tactile.

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.

From the latest issue of Real Simple:

Two of this year’s “new” shades — sage and curry — sound decades away from the avocado green and harvest gold that distinguished so many interiors in the 1970s. But guess what? The colors are exactly the same.

Wait — so there are no new shades under the sun? Not really, says Patricia Verlodt, president of Color Services and Associates, a color-consulting firm in Wonder Lake, Illinois. When color experts like Verlodt devise palettes for their corporate clients, they draw from a vast bank of existing shades, renaming their picks to pique interest. (Harvest gold? Ho-hum. Curry? How worldly!)

Verlodt searches constantly for fresh ideas, consulting flower and rock guides, cookbooks, baby-nam books and even maps. “People think of places when they think of colors,” she says. So move over, linen white, and make way for next year’s Tuscan beige. (page 247)

I’ve never understood how they, whoever “they” used to be, got away with calling those colors gold and avocado. That green doesn’t look like the skin or meat of any avocado I’ve ever eaten. But it looks less like sage! Renaming the old harvest gold curry seems to be a more appropriate tag.

I’ve mentioned before how there’s no such thing as a bad color, but there are poor applications of colors. Apparently the above snippet refers to paint colors and not appliance colors. Regardless, I feel the need to warn Patricia and her decision making peers to keep these colors — whatever they’re called — off of kitchen and bathroom appliances!

These are very poor applications of these colors.

I have to laugh every time I read job descriptions for graphic design positions. Since design is the industry I find myself trained for and working in presently, I scan the employment listings from time to time just to see what’s out there.

The job descriptions seem to be written by middle-aged management types, people who don’t quite grasp the computer savvy of younger generations. I say this with respect to the weight given to working knowledge of software as an application requirement. Learning new software is, in my opinion, second nature to people who grew up with computers in the house. I often wonder about how many really good designers don’t get hired just because they’re honest on their resumes about not presently knowing their way around a particular program. People like me can learn the basics of a program in five minutes (Yes, that is an exaggeration.). When I was in college, a former student spoke in one of my classes about how he lied on his resume, stating that he knew a particular program that he didn’t, and as soon as he turned the resume in went online and found a tutorial for said program. This, of course, raises ethical concerns for types like my wife. And myself.

I can understand that companies want to limit on the job training of employees. They instead want as many productive hours as possible (This is at least true for most companies in theory. When my wife worked at a small community newspaper, however, her counterparts at the larger dailies — in the same company — built at most a quarter of the pages she did in the same amount of time. And no one in the management seemed to think this was a problem.). Thus they hope to get new hires who are completely ready for a new job. It saves them time, hassle and money. But it can also equate to underemployment for the new worker, which isn’t good for the company in the long run either. Bored employees are usually no better than unqualified ones.

Another common requirement listed in job descriptions is that an applicant be “detail oriented.” How wonderfully euphemistic! This phrase is so overused it has become meaningless. Did anybody really know what it meant when it was first used anyway? I suppose we can still assume that it means “ditzy blondes need not apply” (Nothing against blondes here; just making use of the stereotype.). Employers don’t want to babysit employees and clean up after they screw up, understandably.

A new one for me today, as I gandered at a position with Omaha Steaks, was under the “Qualifications” section of the listing on Monster.com. It asked for applicants who possessed “Excellent communication and concentration skills.” Communications is a given, but I’d never seen an employer ask for someone with excellent “concentration skills.” I laughed out loud.

I would be comfortable applying for this particular job based on the listing on Monster.com. I don’t have specific knowledge of all of the software they hope for (and I wouldn’t lie on my resume), but otherwise I meet the requirements.

Though I’m not certain I know what excellent concentration skills look like.