Green Rascal Design

Interesting that I can't comment on a comment on a post. But anyway, the last comment brings up an interesting subject.

For one, I've always thought just the opposite about repeat vernacular buildings. I mean, it is boring, I agree on that. However I don't think our ancestors would have built the same thing over and over again if it didn't work. I thought the same thing in Eastern Europe. "Gee, I wonder why they built everything exactly the same." And then I decided there must be a reason. People don't do things for no reason, at least not serial buildings. At the very least it's out of cheapness, or low cost like in the cookie cutter homes out of Sears catalogs or whatever. Just because I don't know what the reasons are doesn't mean they aren't there! I believe historically humans had a lot more intelligence than we give them credit for. Just look at the Incas and the Mayans...

Some things I've been thinking about lately have to do with the way modernity has royally screwed up everything. I heard last night that the size of dinner plates went from 9 inches in the 60s to 12 inches now. They're right! Dinner plates are HUGE now. Even the dishwasher in my house doesn't fit the new dinner plates we just received as wedding gifts! No wonder Americans are so fat. Honestly! The picture of two eggs and two strips of bacon on a 9 inch plate versus a 12 inch plate says it all. On a 9 inch plate it looks like a meal. On a 12 inch plate, well you can fit a lot more on there. How about 500 calories extra?

That brings me to these new school chairs I was reading about. I love new products and technologies, but these new fancy chairs for high school students are really depressing. They made a point to make it strong enough for a 300 pound kid to plop himself down in! They're bigger and have wheels. Pretty soon we're all going to look like those blobs in that space ship in the movie Wall-E. I think if anything we should make a point to keep the old chairs, or one-arm-bandits as they were called in the article. Make it more difficult for kids to squeeze in and move their chairs around. They need the exercise. And they need a reason to not engorge themselves on a full 12 inch plate of whatever fatty badness they can get their lazy hands on. Ok, maybe I'm a bit harsh. But I don't think that making chairs for high school kids that can withstand 3,000 lbs of force is a good thing.

Use the smaller plates, please! They started out that size for a very good reason, and they became bigger for no good reason whatsoever.

I read today about the Diana Center designed by Weiss/Manfredi Architects. Immediately I remembered Marion Weiss showing the plans and renderings to us in my last studio at Penn. Marion was one of the best studio professors ever, and I'm so glad I took her class. It's really cool to see her built work after having seen it years ago in, what was it, the detailing phase perhaps. Reading this article brought back so many memories of my teacher Marion ripping pieces off my drawings and models to show what she thought would be helpful. Oh to get back to that mode of working would be lovely. But I suppose I'm 20 years away from my goal of becoming like Marion.

I saw something recently about an exhibition of work by an artist who challenged himself to create something new every day. Of course it isn't a new thing to do, but the interview brought the concept out of the recesses of my memory. Perhaps that's the thing to do. Although I doubt I'd want to do all architecture all the time. Lately I've just been creating meals every day, which I suppose can be included under the creativity heading if I made it up or tweaked it somehow. But mixing that up with other things sounds like a good idea to me. And I wondered: what would Marion Weiss do? I think that would be an entertaining question to pose when faced with a creativity crisis. She always accused us of being in the midst of a crisis. Hey, this is as good a time as any to say WWMWD? copyright: me. lol

So is this the first day of my challenge? I suppose it should be, but I dare say I've been creating things every day (just about) for a while now. Website, blog and so on... But getting serious and really specific about it is really the best way to go about things in this day and age. Heck, you can't even network without being super specific, I just learned on Thursday. Turns out I've been networking all wrong for months! Imagine my chagrin. Not that anybody is paying attention. Maybe I'll get back into jewelry and add that to the list of services. My ring does get oodles of compliments after all. Anyway, with respect to my list of particular preoccupations, I suppose I shall create something every day. Hopefully after some time of doing this it won't seem like so much work! Right now it seems like an impossible challenge. Although, I guess if I really thought about it for some time I could come up with plenty of things I've created lately. Forgetting that task, lets just say "I'm going to create something new every day." Channel that Le Corbusier or Ben Franklin spirit!