Sideling Hill, Md: A saggy smile left in the rock where man carved out a road.
~
Author: kmarieclark
Categories
Taking Care of an Old City
Taking Care of an Old City
Men work in the streets
blocking off holes in the ground
with their big trucks
they hide the sewage systems
vertical shafts revealing
the underside of a city
networks of pipes
leaking buildings drip
the held-back river
.
They tell the city to notify the residents
a boil alert, don’t drink the water
from where the weld let loose
a steady stream out
something else may have tried to go in
.
Maybe that’s what they were thinking
the people with the old money
who hold onto buildings for good luck,
allowing them to decay, they are
the only thing left of them in Wheeling.
Eventually, it’s better off to tear them down
than let someone else in
to own the city.
.
Perhaps the old-money people still live here
in the bodies of the men
who work in the streets
blocking holes to the underbelly of this old music town
with their big trucks.
Categories
The Structure of Thought
The Structure of Thought – Managing time in an efficient way.
When I am more perceptive of my surroundings I get more from them. I learned while on my honeymoon that I live trying to cram three things in a moment, all of the time! I brush my teeth while picking out clothes for the day, while hanging up yesterday’s clothes. I learned to be more focused while traveling, because when I am out of my routine I don’t feel compelled to do multiple things at once.
I also notice that I feel better when I walk to places. Walking causes you to carve out time and be aware –something that most of our busy-oriented lifestyles don’t incorporate. I think this is why I am drawn to urban environments. Even in a small town of 5,000 people my husband and I chose to live in a house that was within walking distance of our historic downtown. We can go to a high school football game, walk to a coffee shop on Friday night, bike to a grocery store, and attend church, all within a few miles of where we live.
We all need to learn to be more focused and enjoy doing one thing at a time. This will lead to better overall satisfaction, I think. So, I wondered, is anyone else coming to the same conclusion?
Multi-Tasking vs Mono-Tasking by Dumb Little Man was an interesting article that I found. This lead me to this article on the same site which stresses that people who are multi-tasking are actually less efficient. This article about Passion for productivity strengthened my determination to try and not pack too much into a day. If I am too productive, I don’t have a good sense at the end of a day. I feel frayed at the edges, and at a loss for not having lost myself in something enjoyable during an entire day. Where is the balance in this?
One more article, this one from Phys Org, concludes that people who often multitask are actually bad at it. So, enjoy a winter weekend starting now. Make sure to sit back, relax, and take in something you enjoy!
http://www.dumblittleman.com/2009/08/multi-tasking-vs-mono-tasking.html
Categories
The Case for Color
.The Case for Color.
This blog is dedicated to the need for good interiors. I want to make a case for where we spend our time and how the aesthetic of places influences the vibe. There is a relation between happiness and color. Sprucing up where you sleep, eat, live, and work makes a positive impression on what you expect from yourself while being in certain places. The interior needs a balance of materials using color and texture. For example, the doctor’s office scheme below defines one interior using a background color and an accent, I arranged a carpet to look like it had a center mat. The mat is a contrasting color to the edge pieces. This use of carpet in two colors defines a room with a pattern of color, creates direction, and therefore interest. See more experiments with color, texture and arrangement below.
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.
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(In a concrete room a bright-colored rug makes the space)
~Colors and Textures of even simple materials that make A Place~
~Recent Finish Boards and Furniture Selections of my own Below~
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Categories
Future City of Past Imagination
Will future cities have sky bridges, covered arcades, and an opportunity for architects to fill in the only blank spaces left in the city -the sky?
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The City of the Future by S. Holl
Beijings Linked Hybrid
Read about it on Architecture Record’s Site:
Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid in Beijing provides a vision of mixed-use development that engages the city around it and operates sustainably. –By Clifford A. Pearson
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Perceiving – Mangado’s museum in Vitoria Spain
Read about this project on Architecture Record’s Site:
Archaeology Museum of Álava ~ Mangado and Associates ~ Vitoria, Spain
By David Cohn
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Masters of the Neighborhood
Goldman Sachs shapes the spaces around its NYC headquarters.
By Fred A. Bernstein
Categories
My Husband’s Portfolio
Below are some selected works that display the variety of graphic projects he has completed- from illustrative maps to full park master plans. He focuses on hand sketches to quickly convey thoughts and ideas. 
The above image was prepared in order to direct our wedding guests from the church to our reception.
The rendering below is a master plan for a local park. The first two phases – a community garden and amphitheater- have been constructed over the past two years.
Below is a design concept for a children’s garden in central Ohio. A meandering path allows children of all abilities to traverse the hillside while learning about the daily lifestyles of pioneers and Native Americans.
A quick vision of a residential landscape.
A concept for an Arboretum
Before
After (below)
Below illustrates an ADA accessible walkway concept at an Ohio State Park.
Categories
Building Outlines
Buildings that have strong outlines remind me of children’s drawings. The dominant lines represent a true sense of what makes a shelter. It is an honest expression that takes hidden finesse to build.
Carlo Scarpa’s work became a strong inspiration to me when I visited the Brion Cemetery in Italy.
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Scapra & Pugh’s ‘Make It Right Duplex’ Housing project in New Orleans
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Zaha Hadid and her wine bottle section for a shop and tasting room at the Lopez de Heredia Winery in Spain.
photo by Roland Halbe (Architecture Record)
Hadid’s Maxxi Museum
~below~
Rick Joy’s Woodstock Farm in Vermont
Categories
The Ricami Line
Are all chaotic things in order beautiful? I’m in the middle of Terry Tempest Williams’s book ‘Finding Beauty in a Broken World.’ and I think so.
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Salvage. Restore. Cherish
Anthropologie’s ‘Pieced-Together’ Furniture
Second photo above taken from Roz Foster’s article.
Apartment Therapy
{ forgotten shanghai }
&
Atelier Manferdini
The Ricami Line
(Images above and entry below From by Architecture Record)
She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Civil Engineering in Bologna, Italy; an M.Arch. from UCLA; and she teaches at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles — but don’t try to pigeonhole Elena Manferdini. With her firm, Atelier Manferdini, which has a team of four working at its Los Angeles base and two people in Bologna, Manferdini switches hats easily from engineer to architect, product designer, fashion designer, and artist. “Perhaps it’s less common here to branch into many different fields,” she says, “but in Italy it’s more understood that a creative person can be creative in more than one discipline.” For Manferdini, those diverse disciplines aren’t just hobbies. Her firm has working collaborations with a slew of companies from a variety of industries, including MTV, Fiat, Nike, Alessi, Guzzini, Ottaviani, Moroso, Valentino, and Rosenthal. Manferdini gives some credit for her versatility to her European upbringing, but mostly, she says, “it’s digital tools. With them we can break boundaries. They’ve changed the way we produce, they’ve changed the way we craft, and given us less of a division between all areas of design.”
From a dress to a table to a building, it’s all about a shift in scale for Manferdini’s design process. She freely admits that her work is recognizable in all its forms, because she designs “from a unit to a component. The small scale informs the larger.” The smaller the scale, the fewer constraints. Her laser-cut clothing line, called “Cherry Blossom,” designed as part of the West Coast Pavilion representing the U.S. at the 2006 Architecture Biennale in Beijing, informed the design of the pavilion itself, which Manferdini was invited to design as curator of the West Coast USA session of the Emerging Talents, Emerging Technologies exhibition. The pavilion, a sandwich of undulating plastic layers that flowed through and around its volume, followed many of the fabrication techniques used for the laser-cut clothing. “For me, the small-scale projects are really case studies and incubators of ideas,” says Manferdini. “They’re relatively free of constraints. One object is an instance that can lead to something larger, with a longer life. It’s a circular process, and in a way the continuity makes it all feel like the same project.”
The continuity in Manferdini’s body of work carries certain themes — lace and cutouts appear again and again, from her clothes to her Ricami stool and dining table (ricami is the Italian word for embroidery) to her installation at SCI-Arc in 2008 called Merletti (from the Italian word for lace) to her design for a residential tower in Guiyang, China, which features an intricate draped skin akin to Guiyang women’s traditional filigree headdresses. Manferdini is one of 11 architects chosen to provide a single part of Guiyang’s master plan, and her proposal is a response to the site’s landscape and cultures. “For me, the relationship with the client is a huge creative component,” she says. “For a project like this, you really have to be inventive.” Not only for this project; inventive thinking is second nature to Manferdini. “My teaching, my work, my life in Los Angeles, it’s all very motivating,” she says. “You have to open your mind to the possibilities.” -By Ingrid Spencer for Architecture Record)
A few buildings and spaces that have caught my attention lately have had one thing in common -an integration of planes and material, held off or touching one another, laced over or glossed expressing a mirrored place, unraveling as one walks through a place. The architecture is cognoscente of being touched and lived-in and I am fascinated by it! Enjoy~
Navy Federal Credit Union – Rheinzink
Ceramiche Supergres has won the prestigious ECOHITECH 2009 AWARD in the “Hi-tech eco-virtuous products” category for its latest innovative porcelain stoneware collection, A.I.R. (Architecture in Respect), manufactured using a high percentage of post-consumer recycled material (CRT glass) derived from the recovery of the cathode ray tubes of obsolete TV sets and PC monitors. – Ceramic Industries
Liberty Tiles post industrial recycled content glass tiles that look like sun streaked stain glass through a cathedral window on a sunny day. – Jetson Green
Step Up on 5th in Santa Monica, CA by Pugh & Scarpa
These screens not only play with color, but they dapple light to amuse the passerby and serve as an exterior screen, a passive house strategy, that blocks the sunlight from a window on the exterior side of the glazing. -Architecture Record
Pugh + Scarpa have been on my favorite architect list since I was introduced to their work surrounding the rebuilding of New Orleans. Their Make-It-Right duplex has the true lines of a house that I appreciate. Their houses look like houses, and when they need to rise above the ground they do so with a barely noticeable way of growing.
~ How to efficiently heat your renovated Home ~
Five Ideas
1. Geothermal
by The Greenest Dollar
Energy Star reports that a geothermal heating system is the most efficient and environmentally-friendly way to heat your home.
Geothermal literally means “earth heat”. And, to put it bluntly, they’re awesome systems.
Traditional forced-air systems (like most of us have) use the outside air as a base to heat the house. So, if it’s 10 degrees out the furnace has to heat that 10 degree air up to 70 degrees to make it comfortable inside. This, as you can imagine, takes a lot of energy to do.A geothermal system, on the other hand, uses the constant, stable temperature of the earth as a base to heat your home. The earth’s temperature stays at a constant temperature, usually 45 degrees to 75 degrees, depending on your latitude. Because the temperature of the earth is much higher than the outside air, it takes a lot less energy to get it to 70 degrees.
The unit works with large coils that are buried in the earth. A liquid, usually a mixture of water and anti-freeze, runs through the tubes. That water (which is the same temperature of the earth) is then run through your home. A compressor extracts the heat from the water, and then raises the temperature to what your thermostat is set at.
The system also works in reverse: in the summer, your geothermal unit can easily cool your home using the earth’s temperature at a fraction of the cost of your air conditioner.
Now, the costs for installing a geothermal heating system are pretty steep. You can bank on spending $7,000 to $15,000 for a complete system.
But, here’s the good news. Depending on your part of the country, the system will pay for itself in 5-8 years and add significant resale value to your home.
Plus, the U.S. Department of Energy reports that geothermal heating systems run at 300%- 600% efficiency on the coldest nights, versus 175%- 250% of air-source heat pumps on cool days.
Many experts claim that a geothermal system in a 1,500 square foot home will heat and cool your home for $1 per day. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty awesome.
And the best part is that you’re not using any fossil fuels to heat and cool your home.
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2. Fire Place Heat Exchanger
by Green $ense
A fireplace heat exchanger upgrade or and EPA certified insert which I looked up on E How to try to understand a bit better. The idea is that you can insert a new energy-efficient unit into your existing hearth and allow the heat generated by the fire to help generate heat into your home through a blower door.
Inserts for wood-burning fireplaces improve the safety and efficiency of the unit. An insert is a metal firebox, often with a glass door for visible flames, which fits within the fireplace opening, allowing the smoke to be vented through the existing fireplace chimney.-E How
3. Furnaces
by Lennox,
I reviewed gas and electric furnaces, and have based the following on efficiency ratings. ‘A natural gas furnace that operates at 80 percent efficiency–80 percent of the energy used to run the furnace goes into warming the air–will perform better than a gas furnace rated at 70 percent. An electric furnace rated at 90 percent will be closer in cost to a gas furnace rated at 80 percent than one at 90 percent.’ –E How states.
So, the first furnace I looked into, a Lennox SLP98V, is a 98% efficient gas furnace.
Consumer Reports breaks down a review on the most common brands on their website too here.
Consider also a programmable thermostat that allows you to have heat when you need it most. Not when you aren’t at home, and not when you are under the covers. Places where you have a lot of southern light will be warmer, and tend to need different air conditions than do the shady Northern facing rooms.
4. Heat Pump
I’ve recently been introduced to the Fujitsu Mini-Split heat pump by a friend who uses the system to create a warm room in his super-insulated home. It is a ductless system that runs coils through your walls to a wall or ceiling mounted unit that heats or cools your air for comfort. Though, some people may not like the wall mounted aesthetic.
5. Insulate!
As always, I think it’s best to keep in that warm air with great insulation and to caulk around openings, penetrations and drywall connections.
A few insulation products that I have researched are: Weka – Wool insulation through Artemis, Ultra Touch Cotton, Bonded Logic, EcoBatt, Greensulate by Ecovative Design, Cell Pak Blow in Insulation, Green Fiber Loose Fill Insulation, Icynene Spray Foam formaldehyde-free, and recycled newspaper is used in cellulose blow-in applications such as NuWool, and USA Premium Insulation. Insulation board can provide up to a 7 R value per inch as well!
