Kitted Out

I've always been entranced by kits. As a kid, I had a science kit full of little vials and electronic bits, all of which were gradually swallowed by couch cushions and carpet seams. Legos, the gateway drug to my architectural lifestyle, are the apex of modular, reconfigurable toys. I also had Construx, now defunct, which used plastic bubbles and bars to make assemblages. Erector Sets, K'NEX, and Froebel Blocks are all part of the same genre, attempting to fracture the ultimate geometry of the world into a set of discrete, elemental pieces.

Now, I find myself investigating the erector sets of the adult world. A recent article on Design Observer laid out the history and rationale of my old nemesis, container architecture. The author ties it into a larger history of capsule and modular architecture, linking Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House to the modern shipping container iterations of Lo-Tek, Shigeru Ban, and MRDV. This push towards rationalization, modularity, and a set of common dimensions has created a whole class of "standard" industrial objects: shipping containers, dimensional lumber, concrete masonry units, Jersey barriers, oil drums, tires, etc. 

Kitted out. Always be knolling . . .

Chief Carpenter

500-odd years ago, Leon Alberti published On the Art of Building, a series of ten pamphlets on the then-fledgling (formal) field of architecture. Mr. Alberti was writing about design, but called it building.

As I am apt to do, I tugged on this thread a bit, and it led me down an internet rabbit hole. The etymology of architecture, and architect, derives from the Greek arkhitekton. 

Arkhi- : chief

Arch - : principal, extreme, ultra, early, primitive

Tekton - : builder, carpenter

An architect, then, is a master builder. Today, an architect is certainly a chief, a director of works, and a builder of the virtual (drawings, models, plans), but not a builder, in the physical sense. Centuries of evolutionary specialization have codified the role of the architect into a remarkably narrow scope of responsibility. 

Considering it for my first tat.

Climate Change Corps (A Modest Proposal)

On Monday, President Obama took the oath of office and delivered his second inaugural address. Many expected an optimistic, bipartisan appeal, similar to his speech in 2008. Instead, he came out of his corner swinging, directly addressing a number of progressive goals. He became the first president to mention gay Americans in an inaugural address, he defended the social safety net, and, to the surprise of many (including me) he devoted seven whole sentences to climate change. 

"We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God."

The Culture of Curation

Apologies, all, for the long gap between posts. I was felled by illness, as folks often are this time of year. Laying in bed, coughing, got me thinking about the nature of epidemics, viruses, and the spread of ideas. 

I came by the following quote in a roundabout way -- a footnote in Matthew Crawford's Shopclass as Soulcraft.  Josie Appleton, in reviewing Benjamin Barber's book Consumed, writes:

"It is not so much that we have an ethic of consumption, but that – by default – it remains as one of the few meaningful experiences in our lives. There is a tangibility and satisfaction to buying – to picking out a new shirt or a new album and taking it home – that means that shopping remains for individuals a confirmation of their power to make things happen in the world.

The power of consumption has been usefully theorised by the Marxist sociologist Georg Simmel. In The Philosophy of Money, he looks at how buying an object is an act of individual subjectivity, the person stamping himself on a thing and claiming his right to its exclusive enjoyment. Simmel cited the example of a friend he knew who would buy beautiful things, not to use them, but to ‘give an active expression to his liking of the things, to let them pass through his hands and, in so doing, to set the stamp of his personality upon them’.

Shopping remains a way in which our choices have a tangible effect, in which we can make something in our lives new and different. It also becomes the primary way in which people can enjoy the creativity and efforts of others, even if this is done unconsciously, without knowing who made something or how."

Dead shopping cart, courtesy of Schmegs' photostream.

Repair & Replacement

After a long and consumptive holiday hiatus, OG is back on the soapbox.

I feel a need to offer penance after a holiday like Christmas. On this blog, and in my life, I love to go on about consumerism, planned obsolescence, and unintended consequences. But, on December 25th, these things are abandoned, shouted down by cultural fiat. 

My family has made some attempt to address the true meaning of Christmas, instituting a five-dollar limit on gifts. This is great, but it doesn't help my own craven failings . . . 

I went to the mall last week.

I'm not proud of it. But hey, I needed some things, and there were sales, and sometimes you need to try things on . . .

And so the penance. A New Year's purge has cleared closets and enriched Goodwill. Insufficiently sated, I went on a repair binge.

Damaged goods.

On (Design) Failure II

Almost exactly a year ago, I shared a story about failure in the shop. Perhaps, after 12 months of middling successes, I was due for another one. Unlike the previous failure, the Barrel Chair, this one works, in some sense of the word. 

Over the last few weeks at work, at the ReBuild Foundation, we've been in the middle of shuffling our studio and shop as leases change and new spaces come on line. As we palletized piles of material, we chewed through dozens of rolls of packing plastic -- a sort of industrial cling-wrap. It came on 3-1/4" diameter cardboard rolls. I found a few more tubes of a similar diameter in a dumpster in our building.

The raw materials.

The Organized Guerilla

We modern Americans are quick to pathologize. With all the pharmaceutical ads, covering a broad spectrum of real (depression, heart disease) and imagined (short eyelashes) disorders, everyone is familiar with the language of diagnosis and treatment. Those terms have quickly become part of our everyday lexicon, as people toss off armchair opinions about bosses, spouses, and co-workers -- bi-polar, Asperger-y, and, my favorite, OCD.

Every designer and craftsman has got a touch of the neurotic. A dose of intensely-focused, self-critical thinking is key to pushing the intellectual process forward. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a specific type of neuroticism, focused on unhealthy, repetitive behaviors (rituals) that bring a measure of calm to an anxious person. OCD, when used in a slang context, is usually wrongly attributed to someone who is (overly) organized or clean. While certain cleaning activities may be ritualized by a true OCD sufferer, merely being neat is not a mental disorder.

A small portion of the mess.