Small silvery living spaces

14 August 2011 by 1 Comment

In the past year or so I’ve become somewhat fascinated by the idea of owning an Airstream travel trailer. This is new for me. At some points throughout life I may have given brief and cursory consideration to owning an RV, but until recently never serious consideration. They cost too much, you have to store them, maintain them and so on.

This began to change last summer when friends visited on their way home from Washington state. All of the camping sites near town were full, so they parked their little camper on the slab in our backyard for a night. Something clicked at that point that allowed me to more seriously consider life with a camper.

Backyard shed with potential

This new thought was furthered this summer as I started a backyard project, building a shed, in order to gain room in the garage for a wood shop. As I got into the project, I began to imagine the possibilities in the lumber I was using. The possibility for a tiny house, living in a tiny space. Or a studio.

I’ve always loved the challenge of designing for small spaces (as do most architects, apparently, smaller than skyscrapers anyway). There’s so much less room for error than in a large space. It demands a higher level of organization — not that larger spaces shouldn’t also aspire to a high level of organization — and the client and designer have to know exactly how the space will be used.

The shed project — combined with Facebook photos from a friend refurbishing an Airstream, milling his own lumber (mesquite) for the flooring — brought me back to these sleek, aluminum houses on wheels this summer, to living in small spaces.

I still don’t know what I’d do, exactly, if I owned an Airstream trailer though. First off I’d have to buy a vehicle to pull it, then have somewhere to go often enough to warrant ownership. The practicality of it still nags at me when I remember some RV parks charge as much to park your trailer as it costs to stay in a hotel.

But the idea of being able to take your house with you somewhere, sleep in your own bed when you travel (to a degree) use your own kitchen on the road instead of having to eat out so much, these are happy thoughts (even considering how often I lament the transient nature of our American culture).

And of course, come Scissortail it could function as artist quarters as well.

Filed under Architecture, Basis for designing well, Christian art retreat, Interior design, Sustainable living

Show, don’t tell: Numb3rs

24 April 2011 by 1 Comment

Lately the wife has been watching the crime fighting television program Numb3rs.

Numb3rs seems to me a fantastic example of telling, not showing. The dialog in parts of the first season that I’ve seen with her is almost comically overt at times. It almost sounds like an advertisement for mathematics.

It’s somewhat appropriate that I found this clip for The Aesthetic Elevator. Despite being poor at math in general, the Golden Ratio has fascinated me as an artist and designer since high school.

Filed under Aesthetics, Basis for designing well, Beauty, Criticism, Design

Fundamental flourishing

11 April 2011 by 1 Comment

Creativity is fundamental to our humanity and a beautiful space is fundamental to our flourishing.

Amen.

Via Transpositions.

Filed under Aesthetics, Architecture, Basis for designing well, Beauty, Interior design

The psychology of wastefulness

10 January 2011 by 2 Comments

Dan Phillips addresses wastefulness — and some of the psychology behind it — via the building industry in this TED talk.

Watch the video embedded below if you have time. If not, here are a few excerpts.

What causes waste in the building industry? Our housing has become a commodity.

Human beings have a need for maintaining consistency of the apperceptive mass. What does that mean? It means for every perception we have it has to tally with the one we had before or we don’t have continuity and we become a little bit disoriented.

It does no good to be responsible at the point of harvest in the forest if the consumers are wasting the harvest at the point of consumption, and that’s what’s happening. So if something isn’t standard it goes to the dumpster . . . I feature all those warped things.

Filed under Basis for designing well, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Mass production, Modern culture, Restoration, Salvage, Sustainable living

The switch to renewables requires a redesign of American life

12 August 2010 by Leave a Comment

On the way down to Nashville for the Hutchmoot we stopped for lunch at a friend’s home near Kansas City. While there I began looking at a magazine called World, as I recall. I glanced at an article in the publication pointing at holes in the recent plans for renewable energy.

The long and short of what my skimming told me — I didn’t have time to finish the article — Renewable energy such as wind and solar won’t work for the cars we drive. No kidding! The article also, if I recall correctly, pointed out that these energy sources won’t even provide enough electricity, even if they are developed to the nth degree, to meet our current electricity needs.

I’ve made the point on the blog before, as I recall, that we need to revamp the culture and our environmental design in order to get to where most or all of our energy needs come from renewable sources. We can’t work from the assumption that we can maintain the cultural status quo while at the same time switching over to renewable sources of energy. Instead, we must become creative in all aspects of our lives. Developing more efficient lifestyles seems like common sense to me — regardless of where our energy is coming from (Per my cursory skim the magazine article suggested nuclear, but I’d still rather see other avenues developed further along with more intentionally efficient living.).

Cameraphone capture of part of a wind turbine, going down I-80 on our way home from Nashville.

On our way down to the Hutchmoot last week, my wife and I were introduced to Rodney and Sidney Wright. Rodney wrote The Hawkweed Passive Solar House Book. He showed us around their house — inserting at least one pun into every sentence — pointing to all of the attention paid to making the home more energy efficient. The energy bill for the home was less than $50 a month for the 1,200 square foot structure in Paducah, Kentucky (a walkable community, he pointed out). The couple paid good money for energy efficient appliances, used prefabricated wall panels with dense foam insulation to build with and of course designed the home with climate and geography in mind, in a passive solar fashion.

It’s going to take this kind of intentionality in our design of life, I believe, in order to make renewables work. Sure some things might cost more now and then, but Wright made a point of saying that even though their uber efficient Swedish microwave/convection oven might have cost them $3,000 they built the home for only $85,000 (doing some of the work themselves, such as painting) just four years ago.

Wright also pointed out that we used to do better at designing our dwellings and communities as they relate to their local environments. What will it take as a culture to forgo the more common and under-considered living spaces we create in the United States?

Filed under Architecture, Basis for designing well, Community planning, Environmental stewardship, Interior design, Living incarnationally, Modern culture, Sustainable living

Let your squares be squares

13 July 2010 by Leave a Comment

Julie Rozman, an architect-slash-ceramics blogger I’ve followed for a few years now, posted some images of her work for sale. She’s moving from Chicago to Urbana to study ceramics, and one of her sets of work reminded me of a post I’ve been thinking about for a while.

A long while, actually. Probably since I graduated from college almost ten years ago now.

Julie's sculpture does not forget it's roots.

In my architecture classes, in my graphic design classes and some of the time in my ceramics classes I watched aspiring artists and designers, myself included, forget the basics of design. We’d go after an assignment with passion, with dreams of being featured on the front cover of Architectural Digest, and forget that there are certain building blocks to every visual and spatial solution. They were overthinking the problem.

I suppose this is a symptom of the genius mentality, the drive for stardom usurping the desire to make useful and beautiful contributions to our surrounding environments.

Filed under Aesthetics, Affluenza, Architecture, Art, Art education, Artist as genius, Basis for designing well, Beauty, Ceramics, Design, Modern culture

Maps on paper (an appreciation for the tactile)

20 April 2010 by 1 Comment

I’ve always appreciated maps on paper, and can look at them for extended periods of time even when I’m not planning a trip. Fandangled electronic options are taking over though, and some suggest this could lead to a loss of cultural and geographic literacy. Besides this, I’ve heard of a few disasterous accounts of over-reliance on GPS in the past year, one of which ended up with the wrong house — full of family heirlooms — being demolished.

The most significant advantage I see in GPS is the ability to point you to local services which the article I link to above also points out. This is useful and something paper maps can’t do.

Still, let’s not give up on tactile mappage just yet.

Filed under Basis for designing well, Tactile

Beer as indicator of quality over quantity

20 March 2010 by 1 Comment

Another interesting piece from The Curator, written by Brian Watkins, talking about one of my favorite subjects, quality versus quantity. Excerpting from his post Good Work and Beer Culture:

    Beer has always been popular in our country, but always in different ways. It’s an old story to discuss the recent dominance of microbreweries over macrobreweries. The shift that we’ve seen in the last few years has gone even further. Now, even microbreweries are giving way to smaller craft breweries, and because of this trend, never in the history of our country has beer been more of an artisanal practice. This is quite an occasion.

    Quite an occasion, because this example provides us with an excellent gauge for how our culture now approaches work. We can all see consumers trying to shift from quantity to quality. Toyota’s CEO recently said that their failure in manufacturing was because they had become more concerned with profit margin than with creating a quality product — ironic, since the highest quality products are starting to take in the most profit. We are becoming (we hope) more intelligent consumers who buy less crap and look for more efficient products.

How astonishingly refreshing that the CEO of a giant company would admit that they were more concerned with profit than their product — and express a (hopefully honest) desire to do something to change that. We’ve all known this was the common corporate modus operandi for years now. Watkins goes on to quote Dorothy Sayers talking about work (in the context of WWII, but very applicable to modern day):

    The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work done. To do so would mean taking the attitude of mind we reserve for our unpaid work — our hobbies, our leisure interests, the things we make and do for pleasure — and making that the standard of all our judgments about things and people. We should ask of an enterprise, not “will it pay?” but “is it good?” . . . not merely where the profits go or what dividends are to be paid, not even merely whether the workers’ wages are sufficient and the conditions of labor satisfactory, but loudly and with a proper sense of personal responsibility: “What goes into the beer?”

Filed under Basis for designing well, Craft, Disposable culture, Handmade, Modern culture

Design FAIL the second

17 July 2009 by 4 Comments

The past year my wife and I have eaten at Red Robin with some regularity, since it’s menu is friendly to gluten free diets. We were there with her family tonight and I was reminded of one of my restaurantorial pet peeves:

Photo0017

Menus should not take up so much of the table. They should not overlap the menu of the person across the table from you.

Filed under Basis for designing well, Design

Massive design FAIL

17 July 2009 by 1 Comment

This morning we learned our termite contract had lapsed, much to our surprise (and, much to our chagrin, very late in the process of selling the house). The realtor reminded me the contracts require payment every year, for which the companies come out and poke a flashlight under the house to scare away the spiders. I vaguely remember hearing this four years ago when Serfco treated the Hygge and Fika.

After hearing this I talked on the phone to Serfco and received confirmation that the company sends out a bill after the first year. Followed by two reminders. But we never got a bill, or at least neither the wife — who’s very administrative along these lines — or I remember getting a bill, let alone two follow up pieces of mail.

The Serfco rep I talked to this morning admitted the bill they mail out looks basically just like junk mail. FAIL. Why, pray tell, why? Yes, the wife and I are human and occasionally forget something, however I’m pretty convinced we never actually received any of the aforementioned mail from Serfco. At this point there’s nothing we can do about that one way or another, but a bill that looks like junk mail? That’s bad business (surely it’s in their best interest to keep customers paying, since if the first year bill isn’t paid the policy is simply canceled), and terrible design.

junk-mail-tank

How many Serfco bills ended up in Burtonwood and Holmes’ Junk Mail Tank?

On the flipside, here’s an old post briefly examining a piece of junk mail I received that worked.

Filed under Basis for designing well, Design, Environmental stewardship

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