It’s still storm season, although the more severe (read “interesting, beautiful, thrilling, where-I-wanna-be”) thunderstorms are up north this time of year in my native Nebraska. I’ve taken a number of photographs this Spring of cloud forms as they pass by, and am also mulling over a couple of new thoughts with respect to their influence in my artwork.

My first observation is pretty simple. It is a comparison between my material of choice, clay, and the material of the storms and clouds I so often choose to represent. The finished ceramic product is very hard, more or less a rock. Clouds possess a volumetric and spatial presence, but are “wispy” as my wife suggested yesterday. They are atmospheric, per se, as opposed to solid. Regardless of this stark contrast, wet clay may be the best material (that I can think of) for molding the nebulous nature of thunderstorms. Stone and wood are harder to cajole into such organic forms, and with clay an artist can model almost as quickly as a summer tempest pops up through the heat and humidity.

Observation number two. I’ve focused, with good reason, on the dramatic forms and colors of the storm clouds themselves. Recently more of my attention is being drawn to the space in between the bottom of the thunderstorm, with a commonly flat appearance, and the horizon. The characteristics of this defined space are a new fascination for me. It’s an enormous space, hard to discern when you’re in the midst of the squall. The colors contained in this environment seem to penetrate the air; they take on a tactile quality. The observed “room” is huge, the size of a city, but only able to be comprehended from a significant distance — to the point the powerful storm becomes an icon instead of a threat.

I don’t know where these new thoughts will lead, but I’m eager to find out. I’ve begun with some sketches to further this novel surveillance and hope I can act on them in the next few months.

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.

On the morning bike ride I noticed new signage on the old Daddio’s building in downtown Siloam Springs. I’ve been told this building was, in its distant past, a bank. More recently it’s housed a coffee shop and pizza parlor if I remember rightly, although in the five years I’ve lived in Siloam it hasn’t functioned for anything more than storage.

The signs read as follows:

This is one of the downtown partnership buildings which I mentioned last month, a collaborative effort between the Houston family and Drake Renovations, as you can tell from the sign in the window of the building.

I also stopped at the farmer’s market for some local produce on my way home this morning. I arrived a little early; some of the vendors were still setting up. The market was recently moved to Bob Henry Park from the corner of University and Mt. Olive. The former location provided better visibility and a more central location in the small downtown area. I’m not sure why it was moved.

The market is a small affair for our small town of 14,000 people, but it seems have grown in the last two years. It bothers me, in the new location, that the vendors are so spread out. You can see in the photo three blue tents, peddling flowers and some produce, about half a block from the couple in the foreground. The spread goes another half block to the left with tables full of plants, pillows and — thankfully — farm fresh eggs.

This morning I purchased flowers, dill and fresh tomatoes. The advantage of local food, among other things, is knowing where it comes from. I was amused earlier this week when some government bureaucrat hollered on the news about needing new laws so that consumers know where there produce comes from, in relationship to the recent salmonella outbreak.

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.

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.

James S. Russell, Bloomberg.com’s architecture critic, reviewed a book by former Boston University president John Silber which is titled Architecture of the Absurd: How `genius’ disfigured a practical art. He didn’t like the book, and thus my reply to Russell’s review won’t be about the book. But I would like to take a few of quotes from the piece of writing, beginning with the following.

A great many people seem to take personal umbrage at architecture that fails to speak to them in a language they understand, especially if it is expensive architecture, designed by someone famous.

Doesn’t a diversity of expression make sense in a nation devoted to innovation, aspiration and individualism?

In art or architecture, umbrage is offered aplenty from many corners of the country when the viewer can’t personally connect with a building or sculpture. Depending on how the distaste is presented, I don’t really have a problem with people’s personal aesthetics — as long as they are confident in their own tastes and, hopefully, able to elaborate on them in the course of conversation. The more interesting half of the above quote is the second sentence.

To answer Russell’s question in said sentence, “yes.” A diversity of expression makes sense in America with respect to our innovation, aspiration and our ethnic variety. We are a large country with many heritages and local cultures (although I fear that large enterprising industries such as Wal-Mart and McDonald’s have done damage to local color in the states). I’m not so much on board with the fervent individualism so prevalent in the U.S., but I understand that the author isn’t necessarily making an endorsement of this as much as making an observation. Further, it seems as though communal living is making a bit of a comeback. For instance, friends of mine moving back to their hometown of Chicagoland are looking into a large building being converted into a community-based living situation (I’ve forgotten the word they’re using for the idea). Hopefully this isn’t just a fling like it was in the ’60s and ’70s, but a genuine shift in our country’s culture that leads us to be a less isolated and more interactive society.

Adding to the appearance that we’re embracing a more collaborative and open way of living is this quote from Russell, referring to Frank Gehry’s Stata Center:

Scientists themselves sought a building design that would ease communication and help break down institutional boundaries that impede research. These are crucial research imperatives that are of concern throughout the scientific community . . .

For meeting and sharing ideas, Stata seems to succeed admirably. On several visits, I’ve seen the building bustle, with its main-level internal street full of people working alone and hanging out together. Many universities would love to duplicate Stata’s buzz.

Russell goes on to observe that Silber seems unable to abide risk-taking in new construction for fear of failure. “He’s hardly unusual,” the architecture critic goes on to say. “We’ve become a nation that works, shops and learns in enervating warehouses that often do not even rise to the level of mediocrity.” I remember reading, as a freshman in college, a series of essays about Wal-Mart. Most of the essays talked about the damage the Bentonville behemoth did to local economies, but I remember one addressing the aesthetics of the buildings. It made a comment suggesting most Wal-Mart buildings were little more than gray boxes. Amusingly, an exec in the company replied to this assertion by referring to the retail giant’s stores as “handsome.”

Most, if not all, Wal-Mart buildings are not handsome. They are basically enervating warehouses. Some of the company’s newer retail locations break from the gray shoe-box mold, but I imagine they only do so with much angst. Up in Lincoln, Nebraska, Wal-Mart first wanted to build downtown, asking for two whole city blocks: One for the building, and one for parking. City planners rightfully balked at the idea. A few years later a proposal was made for a store near the mall which fell through as well. The first, snicker, “handsome” Wal-Mart in this city of more than 200,000 finally went up on the northern outskirts of town. The second location was built only a few years ago — at least a decade after the first — and boasts a brick facade with green trim, just like the buildings adjacent to it. Very few Wal-Marts use brick. I can guess, with a lot of certainty, that this was required by the city and or the developer.

The giant is beginning to make some concessions, and local culture should benefit from this if they play their cards right. I love the quote from the ill-reviewed and recent Rocky and Bullwinkle film, when Bullwinkle asks Rocky “Haven’t we been here before?” as they drive across the country. Not every community needs to look strikingly different from all others, but possessing a somewhat unique visual identity in line with surrounding culture and geography is appropriate and desirable.

Read another take on Gehry’s Stata building here. Photo by Andy Ryan from MIT’s website.

Thanks to Sue Ellen, a former resident of Siloam Springs and neighbor of Ella May Mason, for emailing me the following photograph of another Mason watercolor.

My gut level reaction upon seeing this work was to identify it with the kind of generic paintings one sees on the wall of a hotel room. I think, in part, the frame in this photograph isn’t living up to the complexity of the painting. With a more neutral matte and elaborate (or, perhaps, just wider) frame, my gut would probably think differently of this watercolor. My eyes are telling me that Mason was an very proficient illustrator. This would, I imagine, be a very time consuming work of art. Of course, every Mason work is interesting to me since I live in her former home.

Sue Ellen’s comment imparted a number of interesting details about the artist. Here’s an excerpt:

She was extremely intelligent and loved to talk about any subject, she excelled in the world of art. She knew so many painters personaly. I always looked up to her. I used to take my small daughter down to her house in hopes that some of that “fiesty’ spirit would rub off on her. I think it did, and I may pay for that one day, but I don’t mind.

See other Ella May Mason paintings via this link.

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.

I missed the opening for this show but was able to wander through the gallery this afternoon after meeting a friend on campus. I really didn’t know what the show was about, but to be honest didn’t have very high hopes. Thankfully I was surprised. The works on display covered roughly 100 years, from the late 1800s to late 1900s, and were each a unique work. A wide variety of styles comprise the exhibit.

I chose two images to give you an idea of the works. The first was an interesting painting, but was more interesting to me in that it was torn, sort of repaired and now is part of a gallery show. I like the sense of reality and temporality this conveys. Works of art aren’t necessarily untouchable. Paintings aren’t going to last forever, as much as we’d like to be able to preserve so many masterpieces.

“Two Women and a Soldier” by Dean Cornwell

“End of Rivalry” by Laurence Fellows