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.
Airplane hotel in Costa Rica, hostel in Stockholm 1 May 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Architecture, Interior design, Restoration, Salvage.add a comment
File this under just for fun on Friday: Costa Rican Airplane Hotel Takes Flight. Fits right into my [lagging] commercial flight fetish too.
The two-room Boeing 727 suite is part of the Costa Verde Resort in Manuel Antonia, Costa Rica. Rates range from $300-$350 a night.
In February, The inhabitat blog reported on a Boeing 747 turned into a hostel for visitors to Stockholm. As if I needed another reason to visit the land of my (and my wife’s) ancestors,m a land full of good design, generally speaking.
The retired jumbo jet rests at the Stockholm-Arlanda airport. Tthe Jumbo Hostel’s offers a variety of rooms ranging from 350-3300 SEK (~ $40-$400). A conference room is available for rent as well. I think the next Mission Data International board retreat should be held there (in case my boss is reading this).
Anna Keiller smoked ceramic sculptures 27 April 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Artist profile, Ceramics, Found objects, Salvage, Sculpture.1 comment so far
Via Twitter (and thanks to searches I’ve set up in TweetDeck) I’ve become internetly acquainted with ceramic sculptor Anna Keiller. The most recent post on her blog, Fire and Earth, details her smoking process, which is much more exciting than using an electric kiln (as I do).
She also has an older post that talks a little more about smoke firing titled Smoke Firing. I talk about my process in this post from last July. The following is one of her recent works titled The Abduction, after a Swedish fairy tale. I quite like the coloring on the piece, and give her props for the use of salvaged materials in the base and post.
I think I’m going to have to find myself a barrel and try this smoking method out. It looks much more fun and is probably cheaper than running the kiln to smoke. The only trick to barrel smoking for me could be locally enforced burn bans we suffer from in Northwest Arkansas on a fairly regular basis.
Mass adoption of electric cars 13 April 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Modern culture, Sustainable living.add a comment
Shai Agassi, founder and CEO of Better Place, explains how to get countries to change from oil to electric en masse in this TED talk:
The only thing I recall taking issue with in the video is his use of the term zero carbon. Sure, the resulting vehicle may not create any emissions as it’s used, but the invisible elephant is still in the room. The steel, plastic and batteries for that vehicle still have to be manufactured, and the plant they are manufactured in likely still uses coal power.
(For what it’s worth, when I toured a coal fired power plant in grade school I was told that, if it it was operating properly, no smoke ever floated out of the premises. What we see coming out the stacks should be steam. If this is true — and a lot of people seem to think it isn’t — the problem with coal power isn’t that it pollutes, it’s that it’s a finite fossil fuel.)
And even if we get those factories switched over to sustainable power such as wind and solar, zero impact on the environment is not a reality. Ever. Which I’ve pointed out before. We’ll still mine the earth for raw materials to create turbines and solar panels out of. We’ll still need to dispose of turbines, batteries and solar panels when they wear out. There will still be detractors who point out the environmental impact of these new energy sources, such as how wind power apparently desertifies surrounding landscapes.
I’ve said this already and I’ll say it again. Subduing the earth, as we humans were instructed to do, will always have some kind of result that some person will see as negative. Our goal, thus, is to always strive to be better stewards of the planet.
Two bathrooms and a warehouse 5 April 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Affluenza, Architecture, Disposable culture, Entitlement, Interior design, Modern culture, Restoration.2 comments
Yesterday we drove home from western Oklahoma, visiting the inlaws and looking at some disappointing real estate. Round about Tulsa two things occurred to me.
No less than two bathrooms
As my wife and I look at houses and buildings to buy, the subject of bathrooms retains a cursory spot in my brain. Further, I know a few young couples looking for their first house in this buyer’s market. As I chatted with the masculine half of one such couple a few weeks ago, he shared that his wife wants two bathrooms. I’m wondering if the other couples possess similar criteria; I’m assuming so. Our former realtor friend also constantly harps on how we should add another bathroom to our bungalow.
Really, though, what’s wrong with just one bathroom? It’s certainly less to clean, and functions just as well as two — especially for a couple with no kids. I have to wonder if the desire on the part of people searching for homes, and the suggestions on the part of HGTV experts, aren’t largely indicative of our culture of affluence.
That is, we’re spoiled. Rotten.
I don’t deny the luxury of multiple toilets in a house. Were I to design a home for myself I’d likely — although not necessarily — incorporate one full bathroom along with a powder room for guests. And if I really wanted to be decadent, I’d flesh out a master suite with its very own commode and shower. Of course at this point I’ll need a maid, or, if you’ll allow me to be so politically incorrect, a stereotypical 1950s housewife. Apparently I’m a sucker like all the rest of you.
All of this, however, is unnecessary, especially for couples without children, or even couples with two children. It is what we want though, and in America we’re used to getting what we want when we want it, even if the same luxuries might have taken our parents decades to work up to. Gimmee gimee.
The new old warehouse districts
As we cruised Highway 169 down towards a Chipotle yesterday I took note of an exit littered with warehouses. Enormous tin sheds sprawled westward, with sundry truck trailers backed up to them waiting to receive and regurgitate every kind of consumer good.
Then I thought of so-called warehouse districts, parts of cities formerly used as fish markets or garment factories, now retooled into retail and living space. While it’s possible to retrofit almost any space, that kind of useful transformation doesn’t seem as likely or desirable in modern industrial locations where the structures have little or no endearing character.
What will become of these acres of bland metal warehouses? Will they simply be torn down and recycled after sitting vacant for so many years — assuming they will become vacant as the economy shifts, as it is wont to. Or will future generations ignore the lack of aesthetic (and structural) appeal and rush in? Will artists fill up the spaces when they are cheap, turning them into homes and studios like the much more stately brick packing plants of old?
Image from Wikipedia.
IAM Encounter: On conferences and NYC 2 March 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Disposable culture, Mass transit, Personal reflection.1 comment so far
This will be the first in a series of entries parsing my thoughts from the International Arts Movement’s Encounter 2009 conference.
On Conferences
I’ve attended a number of conferences and trade shows over the past six years — from two days to one week, a few hundred participants to 30,000 attendees. My wife and I agreed before I left for New York that paying for these kind of events is more or less a crapshoot. You don’t know if it will actually be of value until you get there. You pay to register, transport yourself to the venue, pay for hotel and food and hope for the best.
I’ve learned that such conferences, despite all of their planning with seminars, plenaries and exhibit halls, are best for organic networking. IAM Encounter was no different. Yes, I gleaned some good stuff from the seminars and even the plenaries — which, for the most part, exceeded my expectations — but the meat of the conference was in the people I met in the hallways and bookstore.
On New York City
I was actually a tad nervous prior to my first time in the Big Apple, for some irrational reason. The whole thing went off without a hitch, even though I ticked off the bus driver who drove me from the Newark Airport into the city. In my defense, he was in a bad mood before we left the airport.
That first experience interested me though, in that my uncle previously expressed how nice New Yorkers were in his opinion, at least compared to Chicago-ans. I was always skeptical of his assessment, mainly because people like he and I who haven’t lived in either of these cities get very limited exposure to a reasonable cross-section of the community. That said, most people in the Big Apple were personable; the exception seemed to be transit workers (even beyond the aforementioned bus driver).
The city is much dirtier than I expected. It was encased in a brownish-yellow dome of smog, so much so that I had to squint from the airplane in order to actually see the skyline as we flew into Newark. I was surprised at the volume of trash littering streets and subways, although with such a concentration of people in such a small area I shouldn’t have been.
I was In all likelihood comparing the actual city to my impressions of it in TV and film. I spent time in the Upper East Side, Midtown, Downtown, Chelsea and Tribeca, which barely scratches the surface of the metro but isn’t a cloistered experience wither. None of the neighborhoods looked like sets from Seinfeld or Friends that I could recall. Then I remembered hearing a number of years ago that a lot of movies set in New York City are actually filmed in Toronto, mainly because it’s similar in appearance and a lot cleaner.
A modern home’s lack of foresight 2 February 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Affluenza, Architecture, Basis for designing well, Community planning, Design, Disposable culture, Interior design, Modern culture, New Urbanism, Northwest Arkansas, Siloam Springs, Sustainable living.7 comments
Last week — during and following the great ice storm of 2009 — my wife and I were without power for four days, almost 100 hours by her count. We learned very quickly how inept so many modern American homes are when it comes to, well, self-sufficiency.
We toughed it out for two nights, but after seeing our own breath upon waking the second morning we decided that was enough. The house registered 43 degrees (the lowest it would get, from what we could tell).
Our little bungalow, like so many other American dwellings, lacks a fireplace (or wood-burning stove). Such a simple implement, a staple in buildings for millenia, and quite basic to everyday activities such as lighting, heating, cooking and romance and our little Hygge and Fika (as we’ve so named our cottage) falls short in this category.
Our American homes aren’t built to function without electricity. Sure we have candles and battery operated lanterns, and perhaps even portable heaters. But kerosene and gas heaters are supposed to be used in “well-ventilated” areas (which makes me wonder why I have one built into the third bedroom in my house), lest you die from carbon monoxide. A friend suggested that these function just to cut the chill. That is how I’ve used ours, but it wasn’t enough to cut the chill back from 43 degrees.
Why, pray tell, aren’t houses built in a self-sufficient manner? How difficult would it be to design for south-facing windows to capture the winter sun and westward eaves to eschew the summer heat? How difficult would it be to plan a home around a hearth? Even before my first significant brush with an ice storm, last week, I built these things into the homes in my head (if ever I get the chance to design and build my own).
The simple answer is that spec homes, which constitute the great majority of humble Stateside abodes, are built as money makers more than as places people live. It seems to come back, again, to the short-sighted culture we live in. The developers want to make money now. The buyers, first-time and otherwise, want the amenities their parents patiently waited for years to earn in their first home, even if it means the home is a cheap piece of poo.
How can we change this aspect of our culture? Please, let us change this aspect of American culture!
Image from Wikipedia.
The real and the imitation 30 January 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Architecture, Basis for designing well, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Handmade, Siloam Springs.4 comments
Today’s post — The Truth About Materials — over at A Public Sketchbook is largely a follow up to my Autumn post Entropy, patina and the built environment. From the Sketchbook’s entry:
The predominance of vision has effected the way we think about materials. As more and more communities employ “stampcrete” and if they can’t afford that, “stamphalt” in public spaces, the erosion of values is painfully obvious. The attitude of ”as long as that stuff looks like brick, it’s OK ” is exactly what got the ponzi scheme victims into trouble. Actually all the use of fake materials is sort of like a ponzi scheme–you simply put the day of reckoning off until the whole thing fails and at great expense you end up doing what you should have done the first time around. Materials carry memory, and the replacement of materials with facsimiles destroys memory, with it the hard won truths and values of our society. As an example I’ve posted two images of bricks one of painted stamped asphalt and the other of 19th century brick pavers.
The inadvertent marks of the makers, of the hands that handled the wet clay can be seen in the lower image, the memory of the lives that made these bricks. The moss growing between each brick reveals an unanticipated symbiosis of inert and living matter. the bricks, slightly uneven gently accommodate the pushing of tree roots below without cracking or failing. The stamphalt has none of this capacity to hold time and life–no capacity for memory and for that matter, imagination. The fact that it is unsustainable and unrecyclable is no coincidence. Whenever we remove the dimension of time and the capacity to remember from materials, we fall prey to appearances and hidden costs, not only economic and environmental but cultural and societal.
New Work: Thunderhead 21 January 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Salvage, Sculpture.1 comment so far
I finished a small wood sculpture I’ve been working on for a number of months today. A friend wants to buy it as a gift, or it would probably still be sitting in the garage studio collecting dust. I had been toying with ways to apply it to a sort of base for some time, not liking any of the ideas I’d come up with so far.
It’s crafted from a salvaged board, a very crooked board, of unknown variety. My best guess is that it’s sycamore, although it really seems too heavy for that. Can you say a lot, a lot of sanding.
I really like the little guy (about seven inches tall), although when I applied a beeswax finish a couple of the laminated joints showed up more than I wanted. The form and finish are beautiful nonetheless, and I sense that similarly abstracted storms will be forthcoming both in wood and clay.
Gifting Don’t: Wrapping like crap on purpose 22 December 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Beauty, Christmas list, Modern culture, Salvage.add a comment
I just learned about a phenomenon called crapwrap, where people try to wrap things crappily. They’ll even do it for you, for a fee. The local news spot showed boxes wrapped with gaudy reused paper and brown packing tape.
The interview included a crap-wrapping employee talking about why they do what they do. He suggested it was a great way to present a package in a one-of-a-kind way.
He’s wrong. Really, the boxes just look like your four year old took a crack at the box. There are soooooo many creative ways to use ordinary objects to embellish beautifully instead of elementary-like. Crumpling up ugly paper, poor technique and using bawdy tape are just that, and they are not beautiful when combined. They are simple and ugly.
There are so many more so much more interesting textures and materials around your house that can be both recycled and unique. Think brown paper bags, foil, spray paint, old t-shirts for wrapping. For joining think clips, rivets, thread, thumb tacks; for tags use the inside of Avon boxes, last year’s Christmas cards (heck, use these for paper!), etc etc.
Of course, if you actually want an ugly gift to give to someone, be my guest. Just don’t say the the best way to make a gift unique is to make it ugly.
