Are Some Buildings Too Ugly To Survive?

So I never got around to mentioning this series of opinion pieces which appeared in the New York Times several weeks ago. They're on the above-mentioned topic, and most present a reasoned argument; for instance, Aaron Renn argues that "the most important criterion" for whether or not mid-century Brutalist buildings should be saved is "how well the building fits its purpose and function." He acknowledges that many housing developments of this era have proven beyond rescue because they were "conceptually flawed" from the start, but many more buildings "where the architectural quality and ability to adapt to contemporary standards at a realistic price is high" should be preserved if at all possible.

Raksha Vasudevan, Sustainability Associate at the National League of Cities’ Center for Research and Innovation, takes the question of whether to demolish, renovate or preserve it a step further. She argues that:

What is needed is an acknowledgement of the multiple and hidden costs of our choices. For example, what are the costs of demolition for the earth? What happens to the tons of concrete that fills up landfills around the country? Apart from the fact that demolition in itself is financially costly for government, there are social and environmental costs of that we often ignore. And while preservation is not always the answer for a community, the path to determining what is “right” lies in honestly weighing the economic, social, and environmental costs of our actions.

David Brown of the National Trust for Historic Preservation reminds us that art deco once faced the wrecker's ball down in South Beach, and Allison Arieff laments that many of Paul Rudolph's mid-century civic structures are currently slated for demolition. New Criterion contributor Anthony M. Daniels' contribution is the lone dissenting opinion here, and it doesn't take him long to bring the crazy:

Buildings should be preserved for one of two reasons: they were the site of events of great historic importance, or they are of aesthetic merit. Buildings in the Brutalist style — which uses raw concrete or other materials to make art galleries look like fallout shelters — are certainly aesthetically outstanding: unfortunately, in an entirely negative sense. A single such building can ruin an entire townscape, and it is often difficult to believe that such ruination was not the intention of the architect. 

What's interesting is that his argument would probably be supported by a majority of people: it's ugly, so tear it down. Case closed. But think of the ecological catastrophe that could result if all our concrete structures were simultaneously torn down: the captured carbon alone is enough of an issue, let alone our landfills. It makes me think what was done at Bellevue Hospital on the Upper East Side, where they built a new ambulatory care center to incorporate the facade of the original hospital building.

A curtainwall was all it took to envelop the existing structure and expand the building's footprint. I'm not suggesting that the original facade is anything like a Brutalist example, but this is a method that we could easily explore to deal with renovating buildings deemed too "ugly" to be spared the wrecking ball.

Dubai to Build Underwater Hotel

Yes, you read that right. They say a picture is worth a thousand words -- well, I've got a couple anyway: because what better place to build an underwater hotel than in the middle of the desert? Because where else would you insist on defying the laws of nature? Because who needs water to live? Oh, wait...

Planned Obsolescence Be Damned

"An unemployed man, a retired pharmacist and an upholsterer" sounds like it might be the start of a pretty good interior design joke, but it's actually the start of a fascinating article in Wednesday's New York Times called An Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time. It seems that in Amsterdam, where everyone already rides bicycles and recycles nearly everything and generally does good things for the planet, there now exists something called a "Repair Cafe" -- because they have a cafe for everything in the Netherlands, it seems -- where volunteers who "just like to fix things" will try to save your toaster from the landfill for the cost of, well, nothing:

Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus. Thirty groups have started Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, where neighbors pool their skills and labor for a few hours a month to mend holey clothing and revivify old coffee makers, broken lamps, vacuum cleaners and toasters, as well as at least one electric organ, a washing machine and an orange juice press.

What's so great about this is that not only does it prevent people from having to throw things away (though the Dutch only put less than 3% of their municipal waste into landfills, which is remarkable), but it also provides both a physical place where people who might not otherwise afford to pay for a repair can go and, perhaps more importantly, a social place with a sense of community built around issues of ecology and sustainability. According to the article:

“It’s very much a sign of the times,” said Dr. Evelien Tonkens, a sociology professor at the University of Amsterdam, who noted that the Repair Cafe’s anti-consumerist, anti-market, do-it-ourselves ethos is part of a more general movement in the Netherlands to improve everyday conditions through grass-roots social activism. Marjanne van der Rhee, a Repair Cafe volunteer who hands out data collection forms and keeps the volunteers fortified with coffee, said: “Different people come in. With some, you think, maybe they come because they’re poor. Others look well-off, but they are aware of environmental concerns. Some seem a little bit crazy.”

Crazy in a good way, I hope.

Fox News Says Wind Farms Cause Global Warming

No, this isn't a headline from The Onion; unfortunately, according to Treehugger, it's all too real:

The network got word of a new report that noted nighttime temperatures rose slightly in areas around wind farms, and then ran a series of segments about how wind farms cause global warming. So, of course, did Rush Limbaugh and many other conservative-leaning outlets and pundits.

Here's a taste of how this works. Fox Nation runs a gigantic headline, 'New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming' over a Reuters wire piece that expressly states that the turbines affect only "local climates". But no matter: that the report shows wind farms cause 'warming' was an irony too delicious to be passed up, or to be dulled by inconvenient facts.

So the slapdash notion that wind turbines are somehow causing global warming was gleefully catapulted onto the airwaves, another grand opportunity to scoff at environmentalists and liberals. 

The scientists behind the study, for their part, have spoken up against their work's misrepresentation in the media. In an email to Media Matters, the study's lead author said that the coverage is "misleading." Here's MM:

The researchers, led by Liming Zhou, said it is "[v]ery likely" that "wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the air's heat near the surface, which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases." The turbines pull down warm air, increasing land surface temperatures, which already have "a larger day-night variation" than the surface air temperatures featured in daily weather reports.

But none of that made the narrative on Fox. No, the desire to land an ideological potshot once again trumped an effort to craft anything resembling a truthfully reported story. As it so often does.

It's Shop Your Values Week

Shop Your Values Week starts today. From their website:   

We are the Future  Today's consumers are the new brand managers for companies big and small. With the easy sharing and transparency of the digital age, what we say and think has the power to both carry and destroy the reputation of a brand.  

We are the Community  When we raise our voices we spur improvements in the world of business. Why not bring that power to bear on our community, and to the shops and restaurants we visit every day in our neighborhoods?   

We Live Our Values  When thousands of New Yorkers shop, eat, and live their values, we will send the message that sustainability is profitable, ethics is indispensable, and community comes first. The message will be impossible to ignore.

The website encourages you to take a pledge that you will shop your values and provides a map of participating businesses as well as featured specials. What do you think: a good idea, some skillful marketing, or possibly both?

Those People Look Like Ants From Up Here!

Just came across this article at Discovery News suggesting that recent research shows that human societies more closely resemble that of ants than any of our nearest evolutionary brethren. When you think about it, I suppose it's not too surprising. According to Mark Moffat, the author of the study in question:

With a maximum size of about 100, no chimpanzee group has to deal with issues of public health, infrastructure, distribution of goods and services, market economies, mass transit problems, assembly lines and complex teamwork, agriculture and animal domestication, warfare and slavery. Ants have developed behaviors addressing all of these problems.

Some ant super-colonies number in the trillions, but that in itself isn't necessarily a problem. The real issue here, the article points out, is that "what makes such size and growth possible is that membership can be anonymous...[m]embers are not required to distinguish each other as individuals for a group to remain unified."

The same applies to human beings as well, though unlike ants -- who use primarily pheromones to bond into discrete societies -- we have language and symbols and cultural practice and behavior. Though I personally found the following conclusion quite chilling: "Anonymous membership means that both human and ant societies can grow as large as environmental conditions allow, although some researchers suggest that an ultra large society can implode."

Sustainable Interior Environments, Explained

A Tale of Two Site Visits

Visiting architectural firms is always an interesting proposition. Will the offices be cutting-edge, incorporating the latest building technologies and current design fashion in order to impress potential clients? Or will they be less-than-interesting, drab and utilitarian spaces which cost little to create and even less to maintain? Having worked in offices of both types, I’m always interested to learn which path a particular firm takes.

Cook + Fox

The offices of Cook + Fox, while not particularly showy, are a near-perfect example of a firm which chooses to showcase its strengths in its work environment. Cook + Fox have been at the vanguard of sustainable architectural and interior design for many years, and their LEED Platinum-certified offices – housed in a landmark NYC building which used to be a department store – contain many beautifully-restored elements.

A view of the green roof outside the Cook+Fox offices.

Many of the materials utilized in the offices are sustainable, including the workstations, the surfacing, the carpeting and the paint. There are sustainable technologies built into the HVAC system, and Cook + Fox built a green roof even though they did not receive LEED credit for it. Instead, they simply believed it to be an important addition to the space which all their employees could enjoy equally through a virtual wall of windows.

41 Cooper Square

This newly-built, Morphosis-designed building on the campus of Cooper Union is a glaring example of sustainable design gone horribly awry. While not an architectural office per se, it does house the school’s engineering department. It also contains a myriad of sustainable design elements such as an operable building skin made of perforated and moveable stainless steel panels, radiant heating and cooling ceiling panels, a full-height atrium to improve air flow and provide increased interior daylighting, a green roof, a cogeneration plant and state-of-the-art laboratories. 

A view of the main circulation spire at 41 Cooper Square.

While all of these features may lead to increased energy efficiency and cost savings over the life of the building, they are employed in such a way as to make the interior environment seem cold and uncaring. Although the building was “conceived as a vehicle to foster collaboration and cross-disciplinary dialogue,” the stark monotonous white of its interior and its severe angularity – as well as its seeming lack of these very spaces – serve at cross-purposes. This building may have cost a fortune to construct, but its sustainability is too well-hidden and technological to have a positive impact.

Toward a Design Research Ethics

As a field of practice still in its relative infancy, it is a worthwhile exercise to consider interior design research in light of any and all ethical concerns that such research could produce. In their Practical guide to behavioral research: Tools and techniques (1980), Robert Sommer and Barbara Baker Sommer outline the main tenets of the American Anthropological Association's code of ethics which, in large part, serve as an excellent basis for an inquiry into what a similar code for design research practices should include.

They write, "The code states that anthropological researchers

1. have primary ethical obligations to the people, species, and materials they study and to the people with whom they work.
2. must do everything in their power to ensure that their research does no harm the safety, dignity, or privacy of the people with whom they work
3. must determine in advance whether their hosts or providers of information wish to remain anonymous or receive recognition and make every effort to comply with those wishes.
4. should obtain in advance the informed consent of people being studied, providing information, owning or controlling access to material being studied, or otherwise identified as having interests that may be impacted by the research.
5. who have developed close and enduring relationships with either individual persons providing information or with hosts must adhere to the obligations of openness and informed consent, while carefully and respectfully negotiating the limits of the relationship.
6. although they may gain personally, they must not exploit individuals, groups, animals, or cultural or biological materials." (p. 26)

As someone who has studied anthropology and sociology, there is a straightforwardness and simplicity here which I appreciate. But designers will no doubt encounter additional ethical considerations, especially those designers who practice sustainability and embrace the core concepts of the "Three E's": ecology, economy and equity. Along these lines, I will attempt to rewrite the tenets outlined above to include the wide variety of implications inherent in design research.

A code for design research ethics should include:

1. No harm should come to the physical or mental health, safety, dignity, welfare or privacy of the individuals participating in research.
2. Researchers will not interfere with the stated purpose of a particular built environment or the practices of its occupants.
3. Extreme care should be taken not to negatively affect the attitudes of the users of a space towards either the space itself or those perceived to be in charge of its operation.
4. Informed consent of research participants must be acquired prior to the research.
5. Design research must operate free from the economic support of individuals or companies involved in the various building trades.
6. Researchers must not disrupt or exploit individuals, groups, animals, biological materials, and cultural practices as they relate to the built environment. Such practices will not be unduly influenced or altered by the researchers.
7. Design should be inclusive of all levels of abilities of users of a space from both a functional and sense-based standpoint.

Tweet This

Because I've hit a bit of a wall in my research proposal and need a diversion, how about I summarize another study? According to this one, birds are singing louder today than they did 30 years ago in order to be heard above the din of modern life. "The research found sparrows in San Francisco’s Presidio district changed their tune to soar above the increasing cacophony of car horns and engine rumbles."

So they are not only getting louder, but they are actually changing their songs. Out in nature, if you will, sparrows sing in low, medium and high frequencies -- but, in the city, it's been discovered that they've all but abandoned the low to medium ranges and only use the highest ones, something now officially called the "San Francisco dialect." This is because:

Songs need to be heard, not just because they sound pretty — birds use them to talk to each other, warn away rivals and attract mates. If you go into a bird’s territory and play a song from the same species, they think a rival competitor has invaded its territory. If the rival bird can’t hear the song and vamoose, then it may come to bird fisticuffs. That can lead to injury or death.

Turns out that it's not only humans that are affected by all the noise that has come to dominate our lives in urban centers, and it provides yet another reason to safeguard the areas of our cities which shelter us from all the cacophony. Fortunately sparrows are a resilient bunch, but I fear that humans aren't quite as adaptable.

When Is a White Coat More Than Just a Coat?

In yesterday's Times, there was a rather interesting article about clothes and self-perception which outlined a phenomenon that researchers are calling "enclothed cognition," defined as "the effects of clothing on cognitive processes." In a nutshell, subjects given a white coat to wear which they believe belongs to a doctor will demonstrate a marked increase in their ability to pay attention; however, if they believe the coat belongs to painter, there is no noted increase.

According to the professor at Northwestern who led the study:

It is not enough to see a doctor’s coat hanging in your doorway. The effect occurs only if you actually wear the coat and know its symbolic meaning — that physicians tend to be careful, rigorous and good at paying attention.

The article goes on to describe a growing field called "embodied cognition," of which this study is a part, that believes we think not only with our minds but also our bodies — where "our thought processes are based on physical experiences that set off associated abstract concepts." My thoughts immediately jumped to interior environments, of course, and made me wonder if there is possibly a correlation to be made with sustainability.

If we wear what we think is a doctor's coat and it makes us pay better attention, what if we move into an house which has been built to sustainable standards? When we "wear" sustainable interiors, is there a similar process at work? It made me think immediately of my research proposal, trying to determine if people's knowledge of the sustainability of a space affects their health and wellbeing. This is definitely something I'm going to have to investigate further...

Recycling Plummets Under Bloomberg

Here's some rather disappointing news: in a recent article called Recycling Plummets Under 'Green' Mayor's Watch, it's revealed that "numbers show that the proportion of waste being recycled [in New York City] has been steadily sliding, falling from a high of 19 percent in 2002, to just 15 percent in 2011 — far behind other green-minded cities like Seattle, with a recycling rate of nearly 54 percent; Portland, Oregon, with a rate of nearly 60 percent; and San Francisco, which achieved a record-setting 77 percent diversion rate in 2009."

It costs the city $300 million to ship over three million tons — that's six billion pounds — of waste to landfill every year, though this is down from post-2002 when the mayor suspended glass, metal and plastic recycling in order to "save money" due to a budget crisis. The goal outlined in PlaNYC is to double the amount of waste being recycled by 2017 but, according to the article, a 30% rate would still put us behind a country like Slovenia which manages to divert 37% of its waste through recycling efforts. More certainly needs to be done.

And it's finally happening:

Part of the [new] effort, Sanitation Department officials said, will include installing hundreds of new recycling bins in public spaces across the city, as well as expanding the types of plastics that can be recycled to include items like yogurt and food storage containers, which are currently exempt.

Another part of the effort will be changing the culture of recycling in the city, and I'm wondering what it will take to get everyone from Soundview to Staten Island on board — not to mention all the businesses and offices and stores and everything else. Just as the city has made a concerted effort to get people to stop smoking and watch their consumption of sugary beverages, I think it's going to take a massive PR campaign in order to get the word out. What do you think? How are we going to be able to change people's behavior for the better?

Baby in a Hazmat Suit!

In an article in the NY Times Home section called "Is It Safe to Play Yet? Going to Extreme Lengths to Purge Household Toxins". Good article, great picture.

Cows Are Important

Americans are eating less meat, and this is incredibly good news for a number of reasons. It means that fewer natural resources are being consumed in order to produce more meat, and it also hopefully means that people are making healthier eating choices (the article suggests that health is the main reason people are making the switch, but I have a suspicion that the cost of meat is a large factor as well). But a 12% drop in the last five years? That's pretty remarkable.

As a pesco-vegetarian (pescartarian?) for the last 15+ years, it heartens me to think that people are taking something like Meatless Mondays seriously. And I hope that Meatless Mondays can eventually become meatless weekends or weekdays for whole groups of people. Veggies are delicious, and cows are important -- don't ever forget that! Oh, and this: Eating red meat is associated with a sharply increased risk of death from cancer and heart disease, according to a new study. Just saying!

Sara Caples, Architect

I thought that Sara Caples, of Caples Jefferson Architects, had many interesting things to say about sustainable design when she came to speak at our research seminar. She talked about how it relates to both residences as well as institutions like museums and other cultural spaces. I took four main points away from her talk:

Having more goals results in a “richer product.” The more stated goals that a particular project has will undoubtedly produce a building that is “richer” in the sense that each stated goal brings with it a set of standards which must be met in order to foster a particular end result. The marriage of multiple goals, especially when they encompass things like building community-based initiatives into projects or utilizing modern fabrication techniques to consume less energy, leads directly to a finished project which benefits from a wealth of positive intentions.

The forgotten dimension of time. Designers are often too focused on the three dimensions of space, where length, width and depth exist in a state of relative stasis without the interaction of time, the fourth dimension. One way to include time into projects is to maximize daylight, which allows the inhabitants of a given space to experience the passage of time through the movement of sunlight. Bringing sunlight down into the bowels of an otherwise windowless office allows the occupants to connect to the outside environment and enjoy the benefits that this connection fosters.

Marrying sustainable design objectives to spiritual and social aspects. Emotions are also an important factor in successful design, and incorporating spiritual, social and cultural aspects into a project allows the end users of a space to connect to it on a deeper level. It is when a building can effectively “speak” to its inhabitants that something above and beyond design has occurred, and this is an effective way to incorporate sustainability by making the space indispensable and meaningful to its occupants.

Local climates are important in sustainable design. Without specifically saying so, many points that Ms. Caples made about local connections to climate and culture seem to fall under the concept of “bioregionalism,” a theory which states that humans inevitably interact with and are affected by the specific location which they inhabit. It’s this complex relationship between human culture, governmental bodies and the natural world which can be seen to impact local architecture and design to the extent that historical practices are often “best practices” and an area’s specific ecology can almost always suggest solutions that are both practical as well as sustainable.

Questions on the Readings

Glass, I., Updike, N., Spiegel, A., & Snyder, J. (Producers). (1998, September 4). Mapping [Episode 110]. This American Life Podcast. Podcast retrieved from http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/110/mapping

A perfect example of This American Life at its best: a thoughtful collection of essays built around a simple, straightforward topic. Although I felt like they started to run out of steam a bit by the end, the first several entries were remarkably strong and incredibly interesting. At first I was most fascinated by the guy who makes maps of all sorts of things, and his contention that "there isn't anything you can't map."

But then I got to the part about mapping sound, and I started to get a bit uncomfortable when the interviewee began explaining how different chords are associated with different moods and how the Catholic church, among others, has decided what different sounds "mean." As the narrator explained:

Now that I can't stop hearing it, I wonder if every exercise in mapping is really such a good thing. When I sat at my keyboard composing these lines, the computer hum and fan were droning a minor third at me, an interval associated with sorrow. Before Columbus's day, the old maps simply showed an arrow pointing to the mysterious West, and then the words, "there dragons be." Maybe not every terra incognita needs discovering. But, of course, this is America. We don't just explore, we profit. Any day now, I expect a house tuner to be ringing my doorbell, some failed telemarketer who'll promise to harmonize the whir of my toaster with the flush of the toilet, and thereby guarantee me an inner peace worthy of the millennium.

To which the interviewee replies, "And you could obviously select from -- like you might select from paint chips -- from a variety of different house moods, happy, sad, active anguish in a context of flux." Funnily enough, I had already started thinking about paint colors before he said this, because while a lot has been written about how painting a room different colors can affect mood, a lot of the more recent research on this topic has shown that this is almost purely contextual -- that reaction to color has more to do with individual differences and less to do with overarching generalities. So my question is this: can we ever successfully generalize how things like color, light or sound make people feel?

  

Childress, H. (2010). “Noun, Verb, Motive, Context: Research Methods for the Rest of Us.” Unpublished Manuscript, Boston, MA.

I have more of a comment than a question here, mainly about his point that "research extends what we know." Surely this is true, but I would go one step further and say that "research extends both what we know and what we don't know." That is, all research isn't going to produce the answers we're expecting or, for that matter, any answers at all. But not getting any answers to a question can be as informative as getting a bunch of them, possibly more so. And it isn't necessarily because we looked in the wrong place, or asked the wrong question, or deduced an incorrect motive -- maybe there's no answer because of wicked problems. Childress, while mentioning them, doesn't really address how they could end up causing an impasse (though, admittedly, this isn't the point of his article). Would a de facto conclusion be that any research question which attempts to address wicked problems is doomed from the start? This is where he loses me a little bit.

Greenwashing

Here's a humorous (and ultimately kind of depressing) little something I found on my Facebook wall - it's a couple of years old, but there are some choice quotes. What's your favorite? Mine's "Look, dolphins!"

Parklet Observations

Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm on a Thursday afternoon

Place: Times Square (Broadway from 42nd-47th Streets)

Weather: Unseasonably warm & windy

Observations: Approaching the parklet from the south, one of the first things I notice is that while a large portion of the street is now delegated for foot traffic, people still seem to prefer walking on the sidewalks.

Even though the blue area is separated from traffic by barriers, people seem to stay on the sidewalk even when there was far more room at street level. There are lots of tourists and families in this area, so getting somewhere quickly might not be as much of a concern. It's also lunchtime, and I'm a bit surprised that several tables are unoccupied as I pass - and various tables remain empty throughout the hour even though it's a lovely warm day. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that sitting at these tables might make one feel on display?

Even in areas where there is no neighboring car traffic, people still prefer to walk on the "curbs" and far fewer (though more than further south) walk along the painted blue areas. Few people cross the areas with tables, unless they are using them. I note that younger people tend to congregate in groups, sitting 6-8 people around a small table if that's all that is available. People seem to sit here for longer periods of time -- perhaps this is a result of it being lunch hour?

One thing that becomes quite evident as I watch people come and go is that while men spread themselves out evenly around a table, women tend to sit closer together even when there is plenty of room. I also notice that people seem rather willing and able to bus their own tables -- there is not a lot of garbage left lying around, possibly due to the fact that there are ample garbage bins available, although I only notice one uniformed custodian throughout the entire hour. I also do not notice any police, homeless persons or many people in business attire.

In Father Duffy square, up on the stairs above the TKTS booth, it is quite evident that people congregate around the edges of the amphitheater seating and only sit in the middle if there is nowhere else to go. One the center is breached, however, it becomes more likely that others will sit in the center as well -- again, likely having to do with feeling on display.

Another thing I notice is that even though this is the middle of Times Square, few people seem to be looking up at the billboards that surround them. The makers of Tic Tacs seem to have seized upon this fact, as their signage somewhat proudly announces the fact that "over one million people will ignore this billboard every day." Not sure how successful an advertising strategy this is, but it's certainly an interesting approach.

Gene Weingarten's "Pearls Before Breakfast": A Handy Guide to My Outrage

Although in class I was unable to summarize my feelings of rage towards this article, in speaking with Stefanie afterwards while waiting to talk to Nora I came up with this: because the authors of the study were so worried that they were going to create some sort of mob scene, they limited the parameters in such a way as to all but guarantee the result. This isn't research, imho -- it's stacking the deck. Here is the list of things I wrote out after finishing reading it:

Time of day: ensured that most people would be on their way to work, and less likely or able to stop to listen even if they'd wanted to

Location: somewhat remote Metro stop ensured that most people would be passing through on their way to somewhere else, less likely to loiter

Choice of music: while Bell may be extraordinary musician, classical music is not a particularly popular style of music in 21st century

Culture: the appeal of classical music can be seen as largely cultural, further limiting the number of passersby who might be interested

Class: additionally, the appeal of classical music is also class-based to the extent that attending the opera or symphony can be incredibly expensive

Song selection: by not choosing recognizable selections, they were making it less likely that a crowd would gather and listen together

Children: of course the children were interested -- anything out of the ordinary on an otherwise dull commute would be a welcome diversion

Busking: there is a distinct difference between a musician performing for performance sake & one who is playing in order to get paid by passersby

I could probably write a paragraph about each point, but I think you get my drift. I found a very interesting graph, for instance, which shows that last year classical music albums sold approximately 10 million copies compared to 105 million for rock, 55 million for R&B, 55 million for alternative, 42 million for country and on down the line. The only genre that sold less than classical was new age. From my rough estimate, there are 400 million albums reflected in the graph, which puts classical at 2.5% of the total.

As far as I'm concerned, this rather aptly illustrates the pretty incredible bias that these so-called researchers were working under. Joshua Bell is a talented musician, so went the logic, therefore people will obviously stop to listen to him. If it were Mos Def rapping, or Bruce Springsteen singing, then most certainly yes. But your average person does not listen to classical radio stations or go to the symphony. The class bias here is incredibly obvious and, sadly, laughable.

For me, it wasn't so much a "we're obviously better than you" attitude that Larry mentioned in class, but one of "we can't understand why you're not like us." To which I would reply, "Well, duh." If someone is tuning out a street musician, for whatever reason, at the end of the day it doesn't matter how talented that musician is or how much their instrument is worth. If you don't hear something, you don't hear it -- whether it's extraordinary or downright terrible.

Taking on the meaning of "Green" design

In what seems to have become the theme of the day, here's MoMA curator and critic Paola Antonelli on the state of green design at Domus:

However annoying and ideologised, the green cliché has served its purpose, driving into the public consciousness an awareness of the need to change behaviour. It is now time for designers to get rid of the last vestiges of sanctimony and do what they do best: help society's next step towards a new normalcy that incorporates an environmentally responsible attitude in everyday life. It is time for environmentally responsible, fair trade-based, ecological, sustainable, ethical, reduced-footprint, energy-efficient, zero-waste, bioregional, biodegradable, recyclable design to be less ascetic and more human and vulnerable. If outrageousness, especially of the badass kind, is still hard to find (except perhaps in gaudy, speedy, expensive big boys' toys like the Tesla Roadster or the Czeers MK1 solar-powered speedboat...), the real world needs a dose of that kind of thing, too.

There are so many other fantastic quotes -- like "environmentally responsible design should be like dark chocolate: delicious and sensual, yet still good for the health of body and soul" -- that you should really just go ahead and read the whole thing.

Is the word "sustainable" unsustainable?

So here's a humorous yet troubling graph from xkcd.com which sums up greenwashing quite nicely and also illustrates the incredible hurdles that we will have to overcome in order to appropriately define sustainability. Grazyna & I briefly discussed this in our pre-term meeting -- the idea that we might want to consider avoiding use of the term "sustainability" entirely, since it has been co-opted to such an incredible extent. What do you think? Can we salvage the word and make it mean something again, or should we search for an alternate way to describe what encompasses a sustainable future?

In SF, a New Kind of Public Space

It looks like they're starting to address outdoor public seating in San Francisco, at least to a degree. In Sunday's New York Times article called A Renewed Public Push for Somewhere to Sit Outdoors, the issue is raised in relation to the emergence of miniparks, called "parklets," which have started to appear in various places throughout the city. They are often found, for instance, near areas where foodtrucks congregate and contain either permanent or removable furniture.

According to the article, "This resurgence has reignited the debate over public space and homelessness. Scott Wiener, a supervisor who represents the Castro, has introduced legislation to prohibit people from smoking, camping or parking shopping carts in Jane Warner Plaza and nearby Harvey Milk Plaza. The legislation, which Mr. Wiener said could be expanded to cover parklets across the city, has been met by an outcry from some old-time Castro leaders and advocates for the homeless."

So they're trotting out the well-worn homeless argument, and it's quite a shame - parklets seem a lot like what's been happening in our new pedestrian plazas along Broadway, both in Midtown and north of Union Square. Hopefully SF can figure out a solution, because “there is a pretty broad agreement that depriving the public of seating is not going to solve the problem of who has access to public spaces.” Hear hear!