Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2010

Thinking about built form

I started writing something long and complex about how the house I was born in still shapes my ideas of how and where to live. (I was born at home, with midwife.)

It got too complicated.

So here’s a picture of the building instead:

1 Berger Allee, Duesseldorf

It’s the one right at the corner. (Full photo here.) When we lived there, Duesseldorf’s Altstadt was not yet (re-)gentrified and the doctor who practiced next door provided (then illegal) abortions to the area prostitutes. But you can see it used to be (and, I’m told, is, once more) a handsome building on a street with equally fine apartment buildings. Five to six floors of apartments, and retail on the ground floor (a couple of years ago “my” building had an art gallery – not sure if that’s still there now). Frontage right to the sidewalk (or Trottoir, as Rhinelanders called them), and green spaces in the enclosed Hof (courtyard) behind the buildings.

There’s something about that density I really like.

(Maybe this will be the year I finally manage to read Life, A User’s Manual by Georges Perec.)

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• Potentially Amazing Technology: Is Spray-On Liquid Glass About to Make Everything Greener? : TreeHugger

  From PAM to GLAM (spray-on glass)? This sounds so odd you could write a sci-fi story about it: how the Age of Silicon is taking over! On the other hand, if it works and is safe, then the applications are intriguing indeed:
  QUOTE
  The flexible and breathable glass coating is approximately 100 nanometres thick (500 times thinner than a human hair), and so it is completely undetectable. It is food safe, environmentally friendly (winner of the Green Apple Award) and it can be applied to almost any surface within seconds . When coated, all surfaces become easy to clean and anti- microbially protected (Winner of the NHS Smart Solutions Award ). Houses, cars, ovens, wedding dress or any other protected surface become stain resistant and can be easily cleaned with water ; no cleaning chemicals are required. Amazingly a 30 second DIY application to a sink unit will last for a year or years, depending on how often it is used. But it does not stop there – the coatings are now also recognised as being suitable for agricultural and in-vivo application. Vines coated with SiO2 don’t suffer from mildew, and coated seeds grow more rapidly without the need for anti-fungal chemicals. This will result in farmers in enjoying massively increased yields . Trials for in-vivo applications are subject to a degree of secrecy, but Neil McClelland, the UK Project Manager for Nanopool GmbH, describes the results as “stunning”. “Items such as stents can be coated, and this will create anti sticking features – catheters , and sutures which are a source of infection, will also cease to be problematic.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: sprayon, sprayon_glass, treehugger

• Stroke recovery as a model for cities – Urban Review STL

  St. Louis urban blogger Steve Patterson had a massive stroke 2 years ago. In this post, he makes a compelling analogy between strokes and recovery from them to what has happened to cities and how they should structure their recovery.

  I thought this section was excellent – cities are like bodies:
  QUOTE
  “Cities need to start with the basics, one step at a time. Cities need to examine what no longer works and what can come back first. In stroke therapy they leg returns before the arm. Fingers come back very late. I can barely move my left ankle and I still can’t move my toes on my left foot. Cities, I think, have been trying to move their big toe rather than get their leg back first.

  The therapy I would suggest for cities is to focus on minimal basics needed to function, focus on what makes a city a city. Walkable. Parking is on the street or behind buildings. Density higher than the edge.”
  UNQUOTE

  This also suggests that micromanaging the details is exactly the wrong way to go.

  tags: st_louis, steve_patterson, urban_renewal, analogy, cities

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Those imagined chthonic forces

Night before last I had a most impressive nightmare. What I mean is that it left an impression.

I was driving, one car amidst a glut of traffic, along a night-time street leading into the center of town. I was on my way home. As I got closer to downtown, traffic slowed, and then stopped altogether. Impatient, I passed the cars in front of me by driving over the curb onto the sidewalk, passing on the right (illegal, but in my dreams I do what I want). However, when I got to the front of the queue, I stopped, sensing real fear.

Here’s what I saw: The road ahead lay in empty darkness, even though it was a main thoroughfare. No other cars, no traffic, no people, …no lights. Way off in the distance, there appeared to be some activity – fires? – but it was impossible to see that far ahead, and …well, the general sense of foreboding didn’t …bode well.

I didn’t want to look, but there was nothing else to look at.

Except for two guys on scooters, who emerged from the darkness as they came toward us. Their nimble scooters (which may have been electric bikes) allowed them to avoid all traffic gridlock, not that it would have mattered since they approached us from the vast oncoming emptiness of an inexplicably untrafficked main street. They said they had come to warn us, that we couldn’t continue: it wasn’t safe, they said. There were fires downtown, they said. The town was burning, they said. They gave us direction, for our safety, they said. Go this way, go that way, go back, don’t go forward, be careful, be warned, be gone, they said.

Be where?

*

I turned my car up a dark, unpromising side street, but I didn’t really have a vehicle anymore – this was a dream, after all, and what was there one moment dissolved in the next. Seeking safety, I entered a textiles shop, but instead of finding a kindly vendor, I saw them, the scooter-guys, surreptitiously setting fire to a set of richly brocaded curtains. I was looking at devils: fire-starters, chthonic forces that had somehow erupted out of nowhere and were now replicating themselves everywhere.

All of a sudden, being alive felt unspeakably lonely – and therefore scary. There was something really big out there, much bigger than my puny life, but it had no room for me or my comforts.

I woke up, convinced we were going to have an earthquake. (Anything to make sense of fear, I guess.)

I have to stop thinking about death, I thought. After a while, I managed to get back to sleep, that familiar, refreshing pretend-death.

***

For a time, one of my sisters had a mother-in-law who, sadly, actually believed in hell-fires. The anxiety crippled her. Until this particular dream, I didn’t understand how awful that might be, but I think I get it now. For just a few seconds, my dream transported me to an alternate reality where – again, just for an instant – I lost a sense of measure. That’s not the same as a sense of scale – my sense of scale was fine, it just wasn’t friendly. Scale is something you can still play with, but losing measure is what you have to worry about. I was puny beyond measure, the “otherness” was vast beyond comprehension, my sense of comfort was totally and utterly gone. To have a sense of comfort, perhaps you need to have a sense of measure: self-worth, “relationality” to other puny beings (the “l’enfer, c’est les autres” kind), and a good grip on the disparity between your big fat brain (yes!, it’s true, you have a big fat brain, you’re a genius!) and your all-too-faulty flesh-and-blood incarnation. There are no hell-fires, there are no devils on scooters (unless they’re the infamous City of Victoria parking commissionaires), and no one is setting the curtains on fire.

Oh, and we didn’t have an earthquake either…

Unsorting

I read Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart a few weeks ago, and have been meaning to return to it for insight into several aspects of politics as I’ve experienced them here in British Columbia. True, Bishop writes about the US, and BC isn’t the US, and, true, Canada has three big parties, not just two. But in my province it’s really all about just two parties, the BC Liberals and the BC NDP (and our first-past-the-post electoral system ensures that third parties have a nearly impossible row to hoe). Where I live, people do “sort” themselves in ways that are practically as pernicious as US counties sorted into all-blue or all-red group-think ideological camps.

But more on that some other time…

*

Bunker House, Queens

*

First, some observations on sorting and urban form…

Recently, the offspring and I were talking about All in the Family, which I watched often growing up, since it was a favorite show of my father’s. Thanks to YouTube, salient bits of it are instantly available to younger viewers.

Last night I heard laughter coming from my son’s room – he had just finished watching Jeff Rubin talking about how our oil-dependent economy will have to change radically. In the talk, Rubin conjured an image of Archie Bunker and Al Gore together in bed, based on the new paradigm we’re heading into. So of course my son had to research (ahem) All in the Family, and he was watching excerpt after excerpt on YouTube (hence the howls of laughter – I initially worried that he thought Rubin was funny, but no, it was the Bunkers).

The Bunkers

Mostly, aside from marveling at how Archie could spew his sometimes vicious opinions without the PC police censoring him, my son was struck by how impossible it was for Archie to avoid the objects of his prejudice. Everywhere Archie Bunker turned, he ran into “coloreds,” “communists,” “Polacks,” “homos,” and so on through the entire unsorted bin of …well, of what?

Of a mixed urban neighborhood – versus neighborhoods sorted almost exclusively through (upward) economic choice or (downward) economic non-choice.

Without New York City and its population-packed boroughs (in the Bunkers’s case, the Astoria neighborhood of Queens), Archie could have become isolated (sorted), and found affirmation in a like-minded tract development. But in that more urban environment, which isn’t upscale enough to maintain homogeneity and therefore has to accept newcomers constantly, he has to accept neighbors whose views he dislikes. Because Archie himself isn’t rich enough to move, he has to mingle. Because real estate and rents are so dear in densely built-up areas that have easy access to the downtown core, no one has the luxury of living on his own hectare, at a distance. In fact, Archie has to put up in his own four walls with the “Meathead” (Michael, his Polish-American, social-work studying, non-laboring son-in-law with hippie roots). Rents are too expensive for the Bunker daughter Gloria, newly married to Michael, to move out. So the lucky couple gets to live with her parents.

Which brings us to how the tendency to sort, as described by Bill Bishop, even finds expression at the domestic level, in house architecture.

Since the seventies when All in the Family was produced, it has become unexceptional for each kid to have his or her own bedroom. It’s expected that parents have an “en-suite” – a full bathroom of their own, off the “master” bedroom (oh, those feudal aspirations!, sovereigns all, we parents are loosey-goosey in our permissiveness, but masters of our own domains, with hot and cold pulsating showers to warm our cold clean hearts, and Jacuzzi tubs for all that stress, of course!).

It’s not unusual for the kids to have either their own (shared) bathroom, or possibly even have en-suites of their own. We’ve become a bit antiseptic in how we provision for privacy within our own homes, and we sort in our own four walls.

Since the days of All in the Family, it’s normal for a family member to go off to his or her own domain (senior masters and junior masters-in-training) for entertainment. A TV in a kid’s room isn’t unusual, I hear…

Within Archie Bunker’s economic class and in his Queens neighborhood, that sort of domestic sorting was impossible: the houses weren’t built for it. And the social sorting proved equally impossible for the same reasons. If you were lucky, you might climb into Queens (economically), but it was harder to climb “above” Queens and still stay within spitting distance of the city. Unless you struck it insanely and unusally filthy rich (as The Jeffersons did, the Bunkers’s African-American neighbors who moved to Manhattan), you had to forsake the urban if you wanted to climb out of the Queenses of most older American cities. Hie thee to an ex-urb and sort yourself! Stay in Queens and be ready to rub up against people.

It’s kind of strange to think that television had to beam Archie Bunker’s discomforting vitriol into the already-sorting 1970s living rooms of low-density suburbs, where people were replicating in their domestic living arrangements the social sorting they preferred in their neighborhoods.

Even Archie noted that it’s natural for people to be “among their own kind” (which for him meant blue-collar bigots). He was just lucky enough not to be able to afford it.

(A fluke encounter: Sammy Davis Jr. finds himself trapped for a while in Archie's lair, er, chair)

A mystery dream…

On Sunday morning I awoke to the sound of caterwauling. It seemed to come from the sidewalk directly outside my bedroom window. When I first awakened, I didn’t actually understand what the noise was – at first I thought it was a baby crying.

The voiceless voice in my head – you know, the one that typically keeps up a running commentary (unless you’re an enlightened monk or something) – “spoke” to me at the same moment as I awoke.

It said, “What’s that noise?”

Fair question. “I don’t know,” I answered (silently, of course).

We (my voiceless voice and I) listened, and then, in my head, I voicelessly replied, “It’s a cat. Caterwauling.”

A third voice came along, complementing the duo my own internal voice and I were dancing. He – I’m quite sure my voiceless …er, partner, in conversation seemed male – said:

“Be sure to wait for the second part.”

“What?” What was that supposed to mean? Oh, right: …nothing. This is all in my imagination, another one of those damn internal dialogues, except now it’s starting to turn into a party, …or at least a menage a trois.

I started to roll over, burying my head in the pillows, hoping the cat would soon stop.

It did.

Oh good, I thought, hopeful that I’d get back to sleep quickly. My own internal voice couldn’t help chiming in: “Wonder what that crazy shit about the second part was supposed to be about?”

“I guess that was just a bizarre figment of your imagination,” I silently told myself.

The cat was quiet, everything outside was quiet, I was ready to go back to sleep.

And then a dog began barking furiously. From the sound of it, a big dog, Baskerville-sized.

Except this one barked, unlike the fictional one.

And that was the second part.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• A quick guide to the maxims of new media | Mark Coddington

  Love this catalog/ summary by Mark Coddington.

  During my recent bout of civic activism with the JohsonStreetBridge.ORG awareness initiative campaign I helped found last July, a huge chunk of my unhappiness and subsequent (still, alas, enduring) depression stemmed from the fact that for a variety of complex reasons, I found myself forced to betray most of the principles listed by Coddington. It still breaks my heart, and perhaps it’s the everlasting testament, when all is said and done, for why Victoria BC will never, ever get a clue. In this town, people still play by the old media rules. And that can only mean that, really, there’s absolutely no room for me. Anyway, read Coddington’s primer – he links to good stuff.
  QUOTE
  “When I dove into the future-of-journalism world, I quickly found that a few of these phrases function as shorthand for big, fundamental ideas. (…)

  Consider this your dictionary for those phrases.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: mark_coddington, new_media_shift, newspapers

• Jean Shin: TEXTile, 2006

  Wow… I love this! What an amazing piece:
  QUOTE
  “In this interactive sculpture, thousands of recycled keyboard keys are embedded into a continuous textile. The keys spell out a line-by-line transcript of the email correspondence between the artist and fabricators regarding the creation of the artwork. As a result, the sculpture documents its own making. Viewers can also type their own messages on the active keys amid the first three rows of emails. These new messages are then projected onto the opposite end of the fabric, thereby continuing the virtual dialogue. The project speaks to the pervasiveness of email in our lives while commenting on the fact that, despite the modern technology of virtual communication, our written language is linked to the tactile sensation of moving our fingers over an outmoded typewriter system.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: jean_shin, textile, sculpture, art

• Chart Wars – Target Point

  Excellent must-see Washington DC Ignite presentation by Alex Lundry on data visualization and using charts (”chart wars”).

  tags: alex_lundry, targetpoint, data_visualization

• Crafting a New World

  “There is a craftsperson in everyone, according to Richard Sennett. But don’t spend too much time plumbing your psyche for a latent woodworker, quilter, or metalsmith. Craftsmanship, according to Sennett, a sociologist at New York University and the London School of Economics, both includes and eclipses the endeavors that might jump to mind. It is an “enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake,” he writes. It’s also an impulse that contemporary culture, with its obsessive embrace of efficiency, financial reward, and the bottom line, has devalued—to its own detriment.”

  tags: richard_sennett, utne_reader, crafting

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• Victoria’s Johnson Street Bridge has significant heritage value – Journal of Commerce

  Surprised to see that Victoria’s Johnson Street Bridge made it into the “Journal of Commerce – Western Canada’s Construction Newspaper” (Jan.25/10) …for its heritage value (not its potential as a mega-replacement construction project)! Right on. (Would love to know the story behind JSB’s entry into the the Journal of Commerce…)

  From the article:

  QUOTE
  “The main opening span is 148 feet in length and when in the open position is balanced over a 45-foot fixed span. The Strauss Bascule Company Ltd. prepared the design for the bascule spans and the operating machinery.

  The superstructure of the bridge was fabricated in Walkerville, Ontario and contains 100 tons of steel. “

  UNQUOTE

  tags: johnson_street_bridge, victoria, journal_of_commerce, heritage, preservation

• Rape of the Sabine Women by rufus corporation

  Would really like to view this film. The paintings by Nicolas Poussin and by Jacques Louis David are both such powerhouses, one can’t help but think that only film-video artists of overarching ambitions would tackle this subject. This interpretation by Eve Sussman sounds very intriguing:

  QUOTE

  “The Rape of the Sabine Women is a reinterpretation of the Roman myth, updated and set in the idealistic 1960’s. Filmed on location in Athens and Hydra, Greece, and in Berlin, Germany, the 80 minute video was directed by Eve Sussman with an original score by Jonathan Bepler, choreography by Claudie De Serpa Soares, and costumes by Karen Young.\n\nThe Rape Of The Sabine Women was conceived as allegory based loosely on the ancient myth that follows Romulus’ founding of Rome. Re-envisioning the myth as a 1960’s period piece with the Romans cast as G-men, the Sabines as butchers’ daughters, and the heyday of Rome allegorically implied in an affluent international style summer house, this version is a riff on the original story of abduction and intervention, in which Romulus devises a plan to ensure the future of the empire. While the Roman myth traces the birth of a society, this telling suggests the destruction of a utopia. The intervention of the women is fraught, and the chaos that ensues transforms the designed perfection into nothingness.\n\nThe Rape… is a video-musical conceived in an operatic five act structure that opens in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, moves to the S-Bahn and Tempelhof Airport, Athens’ Agora meat market, a classic modern 60’s dream house overlooking the Aegean, and finally, Athens’ Herodion Theatre. Forgoing the compromise of the original, the Rufus Corporation’s re-imagining pits mid-twentieth century ideals against the eternal themes of power, longing, and desire. A modern process piece created in improvisation-a product of 180 hours of video footage and 6000 photographs-the video with 7.1 sound installation features compositions by Jonathan Bepler, recorded live on site , incorporating a bouzouki ensemble, a Pergamon coughing choir, and a chorus of 800 voices.
  UNQUOTE

• tags: video, films, rape_sabine_women, eve_sussman, rufus_corporation

• Aakash Nihalani on Babelwire: Episode #21 – Tape and Mirrors

  Beautiful video of Aakash Nihalani creating his “tape art” interventions in New York City’s public spaces. By taking us with him (through his tape interventions) I think Nihalani is really re-imagining and re-seeing space, and that’s an amazing gift to the rest of us.
  QUOTE
  “When artist Aakash Nihalani moved from the suburbs to NYC he was compelled by its symmetry. As an organic response he started laying down tape on the streets and on buildings, creating brightly colored sticker tape boxes framing aspects of the city he wanted to show people, creating tableaus from real life. Both uncomfortable at potentially defacing property by using permanent materials, and enraged at the continued treatment of public artists as vandals, we join him as he brings 3D to his work for the first time, via use of mirrors and passers-by, and discuss why impermanence is important to the acceptance of street art.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: art, aakash_nihalani, street_art, video

• Battle of the Blue Bridge: How the petition was won

  A rather amusing look at history according to Victoria’s mainstream media (in this case by Times-Colonist reporter Bill Cleverley). Wow, this is quite the ellipsis…

  If there’s one thing I’m learning from the whole Johnson Street Bridge issue and process is that one apparently can’t trust our media to get the stories right.

  tags: johnson_street_bridge, media, newspapers, times_colonist, bill_cleverley

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• Home – Banners of Persuasion

  “Demons, Yarns & Tales – Tapestries by Contemporary Artists”

  tags: exhibitions, tapestry, arts

• Design fantasies for obsolete Bay Bridge span

  QUOTE
  Why demolish one of the Bay Area’s most recognizable structures rather than retain at least some of it for public use? “There’s no reason it can’t be transformed into something wondrous, a fusion of nature and the machine,” said Frederic Schwartz, a New York architect who spent last fall as the college’s Joseph Esherick Visiting Professor in Architecture.
  UNQUOTE
  Inspired by NYC’s High Line, Frederic Schwartz’s students re-purposed the Bay Bridge (slated for demolition).

  tags: bridges, johnson_street_bridge, bay_bridge, san_francisco, restoration

• The Best Way to Become the Hub of your Community using Twitter

  Great “SlideShare” presentation on using Twitter to create a news hub for your community.

  tags: local_news, twitter, slideshare

• The Americanization of Mental Illness – NYTimes.com

  One of the many thought-provoking statements in Ethan Watters’s article on modern mental health (and its diagnosis & treatment):
  “Since the illness was seen as the work of outside forces, it was understood as an affliction for the sufferer but not as an identity.”

  Watters writes about how a Western (often American) conception of mental health has shaped global understanding of illness/ disease, sometimes with negative consequences. In earlier times and in other cultures, mental states were diagnosed with a view to “culture bound syndromes,” but modern mental health refutes this. In turn, however, cultural attitudes to mental health can grow more rigid (and unforgiving): your brain is broken (neurological disorder), vs. your spirit is (temporarily?) discombobulated. The former view exacts a harsher response than the latter, according to experiments conducted by researchers.

  tags: mental_health, cultural_norms, americanization, nyt, ethan_watters

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• BuildingGreen.com – HPB Case Study: Overview – Boston Children’s Museum Renovation

  Interesting environmental/ sustainability angle: Boston’s Children Museum is stepping up its green credentials:
  “The museum expansion and renovation was designed to enhance the building’s connections to its urban waterfront site, guided by a desire to build environmental education opportunities into the design. From the adaptive reuse of the onsite 19th-century wool warehouse and industrial site to the new graywater storage system and green roof, the museum has become an environmental teaching tool for its young audience, in addition to becoming the first LEED-certified museum in Boston.”
  And:
  “The museum is a working exhibition that demonstrates green building elements. The programs incorporate three principles:

  1. Green by Example: The “Green Trail” is a series of interactive stations with age-appropriate explanations of the building’s green elements and their relationship to the ecology of the area.

  2. Green Hands-On: All programs will be based on current research on how children learn about the natural world. For example, children and families were invited to help plant parts of the green roof.

  3. Green at Home: The museum will create a “Growing Green” section of its website for further interpretation of the building as well as steps for children and families to take toward greater sustainability in their own lives.”

  tags: green_buildings, museums, boston, childrens_museum, environment

• The Facebookisation of the enterprise – confused of calcutta

  JP Rangaswami on what it might look like when the IT department had “lost control of the device,” the HR department had “lost control of the profile,” and the IT, HR and Finance departments had “lost control of the job description.” For Generation M (Mobile), those are native conditions, and enterprise has to meet them there if it wants to engage Gen M’s talents.

  tags: facebook, confused_of_calcutta, jp_rangaswami, business, management

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.