Simplexity
How do we learn to live like the flower? Graceful from beginning to end, beautiful everyday. From opening to closing, freshness to fading, but never useless or old. I want to learn how to be this way in the world. Full of peace at all times.
How do we come to know a place? Exploration, play, living. I spent some time in the dwindling winter snow today, appreciating what remains. Hoping for more. And worrying about fire season this summer if more of the great white stuff doesn’t fall from the sky soon.
Aging has its own beauty and power.
We are a culture of exaggeration. Journalists lead the direction and we seem to follow. Everything is “cool” and “awesome”, or “dreadful.”
I try to keep life’s experiences is perspective. Hence, this morning’s lesson in scale .
The large hole for the small structure that I am currently building is resulting in the exposure of some large rocks.
Check them out for yourself . The coke can is for scale reference.
drawn from the river
It’s time. Time to consider direction and conception, where we are headed, and how we do what we do.
“Full Fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.”
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Today is a beautiful fall day. Blue sky, crisp. This morning there was frost on the ground, a warning that winter is coming fast. The sun is here now, and I must meet it outside – always a dilemma between making and nature.
We need both to make our lives real:
Our dreams seem ephemeral
Our myths seem unreal
Action upon either seems impossible
How do we make our truth tangible
Unless we believe in them enough to take action? To give them wings..to make the imaginable real?
As we come into the season of half light lets close our eyes and breath possibility into what appears to be impossible. If each of us contributes a culture of possibilities will result.
What is unknown will grow from adventure instead of fear.
Design Sketch, Click Cabin
A critical aspect of designing architecture is that at it’s very nature the process creates tangible reality through it’s physical expression. Both understanding the existing conditions of the place and how the potential design fits into the place along with the ephemeral experience of life, changes reality, and is the great value and necessity of architecture. In its most positive propositions, these changes in our reality provide aspects of positive cultural transformation that change the way that we see the world and ourselves in it.
For the designer, the process is one of the great adventures of life.
Food. What I eat has been a long preoccupation. Long before Michael Pollan gained fame with his book “Second Nature” I was fascinated with food and eating. I am not exactly sure why, I guess it seems to bring the world into perspective for me. The tastes of food tie me to an experience and a place. They are specific, like scents that can bring you back to a place or memory when you smell something in particular.
When I was thirteen I chose to celebrate my birthday at an herb farm that was out in the country in Texas. When I think back to this event, I marvel that there was such a place in Texas, and that I wanted to celebrate my young teen birthday there. No wonder the kids in high school looked at me strange. I was and am strange. The choice of eating at the herb farm was not only for the food, but for the experience. The experience of eating, the celebration with friends, and the place. It was a marvelous place of gardens and green houses. It was architecture tied with food. And maybe that is where architecture and food tied together for me for the first time.
Since that birthday I have remained engaged with food and eating. How it is prepared, where it is grown or produced, differences in spice and deviations relative to the place. I have years of specific memories of eating. I have a collective of experiences of growing food and then learning how to cook with what I have grown. And today I am thinking about how food, eating and growing is becoming a discussion point for sustainability.
If you have been a student at Remote Studio you know that cooking and eating communal meals is an important aspect of the semester. I intentionally integrated cooking and eating into the program because of my belief that how and what we eat is critical to a whole and potentially best lived life. It enriches us, it grounds us, it defines place. It is celebratory, it can give meaning to events, it provides memories and ultimately helps us share our lives with others.
between here and there 