Now, definitely
Think of the things it could mean for us, if things don’t take a wrong turn — poised as we are to realize the better things of our character — to become the thing the world’s looking for.
AFH
Cameron Sinclair presented his organization’s history & progress at MICA tonight for two hours, non-stop talking, to anybody who showed up to listen. Wasn’t all that well advertised — I learned of it word of mouth — but the hall was packed. If you get a chance to hear him about Architecture For Humanity and Open Architecture Network sometime, my feeling is it’s worth working your schedule to attend. Stirring stuff.
Check back in five years
Baltimore has plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the great green hopes — and few are more outspokenly so than Morning Sunday Hettleman, president of the Maryland Environmental Justice Coalition. Hettleman argues that efforts to clean up the environment and rebuild the inner city since the 1970s have often left working people, and people of color, out in the cold. “Billions have been spent in Baltimore, supposedly to help us, and still it looks like a bomb went off. Where did the money go?” she asks. “The money went to consultants who live in Baltimore County. The money never made it down to the people.”
Sitting in her drafty home in Waverly — weatherized, badly, by a city work crew, she notes — Hettleman and Dale Hargrave, a local contractor, make their prediction for the green economy, using history as their guide. “If you come back here in five years and ask, ‘Where did the green jobs go?’” Hettleman says. “Well, they went down I-95. They went down I-83. They went down I-695.”
Doing okay in western PA
Pittsburgh is enjoying some good press, lately, for having been conservative about buildings and urban space. Now that growth and construction aren’t the givens they were in many parts of the country a year ago, it seems we’re going to be noticing elevation to model status of places where — perhaps for want of opportunity to build more aggressively — the emphasis in the last decade or so has been on consolidation rather than expansion. Especially noteworthy is that this core-ward development hasn’t slowed down, in spite of ‘negative growth’ in the overall economy.
New products division
My first Nikon SLR aged with dignity. As the black paint began to chip, it revealed little glimpses of the brass body beneath, like denim fading to the texture of cashmere. I still have my father’s portable typewriter; the keys are rusted together, the ribbon is tattered, and it will never compose another letter. But I can’t bring myself to part with it. It lasted him half a lifetime.
From an article in Metropolis that begins, ‘There are two kinds of industrial designers.’ (Of course there are.)
Climate theory, social theory
Look, fossil fuel, the abundance of cheap fossil fuel, did several things. One was to make us wealthy, one was to wreck our climate. The last was to make us, in this country, the first human beings in history who have essentially no need of our neighbors at all. Who live lives largely isolated from those around us. . . . What makes Americans depressed and sad is a growing sense of remarkable isolation and lack of connection to the communities around them. And that is no accident: how did we define the American Dream for the last fifty years? It was building bigger houses, farther apart from each other!