An Otherworld

There are a number of businesses developing to take discarded materials, particularly building materials, out of the waste stream, and to lessen the need for new materials.

I wish there were more consciousness about the quality of the material, the understanding that this material, although once garbage, is truly and actually a resource. In my view, such material would be segregated in the following way:

• Some material is ordinary, plentiful and useful, and should be encouraged to be used in ordinary ways.
• Some material is special in some way, and its use should be encouraged to honor it.
• Some material is rare, and this material should be saved to be available to maintain existing conditions.

An example of ordinary material is framing lumber, and extremely plentiful, ordinary hardware. This material can take the place of new material in new projects, and should be offered at a considerable cost savings to new material in order to make it compete with the new material.

Special materials could be wood of uncommon species, dimension or profile, hardware items which are reasonably plentiful but which are recognized as special. This material would be given a cost which as high or higher than new material, but not so high as to make it unaffordable to be incorporated respectfully into new construction. This material should be catalogued to permit its availability to be known.

Rare items, special, obsolete hardware or fixtures, as well as specialized parts which often are lost through demolition, would be best used as replacement parts for maintaining the existing built environment. As such, those buildings which still serve a useful purpose in their original configuration and finishes, can be preserved to give us a real connection with our past. These items should be stored and catalogued to be made available to restore original conditions.

This would be preservation at its highest form.

Comments (0)     

On our tour of the Waldorf=Astoria hotel, we learned that at least some of the apartments in the Waldorf Towers are layed out with their multiple bedroom/baths opening both onto the public corridor as well as the apartment hall. This allows those apartments to be rented with one, two, or three bedrooms, leaving the unused bedrooms to be rented individually. This is an example of built-in rental flexibility similar to the proposal in my sustainability exhibition.

Comments (0)     

I was asked by a friend to participate in a conversation about "living gay". The question was what I found to be my biggest joy of living gay. I tend not to think in those terms, since I live "out" in all that I do, but not just in terms of sexual identification. I don't have a community of other gay men around me to live out my intentions, so living "joyfully gay" is not exactly what I do. I am joyful about the gay construction with which I surround myself (mostly in my mind). This was my response:

Comments (1)     

Like most Americans, particularly Americans of my age, my idea of the United States and my position in it was not defined or clear; it was colored roughly by a worn out myth. With the installation of George W. Bush in 2000, and his administration's 911 construction of 2001, my sensibilities about being American have been under attack, and I have been in a constant state of wild fury over the differences between the American lie that I was born aspiring to and the subsequent revelations of the actual conditions I am presented with.

I have been heard  people talk about our human rights, about the needs of goverments to operate, and seen human rights disolve as ordinary citizens feed the unhealthy appetite of antisocial governments with their rights and their lives.

Any government of a society serves the needs of those in the society who currently wield power. Without external forces acting on it, a government will serve no one else. A legitimate government is one whose power is respected by the society without the exertion of extraordinary force on those governed by those in the society who currently wield power.

A constitution which is executed lends legitimacy to a government by providing confidence in the behavior of a government. the behavior does not need to be good, simply predictable. Without the provisions of a constitution which are enforced, a government will serve only the needs of those in the society with power, in proportion to the amount of power wielded, executed in any way which serves those in power best.

Power is the ability to coerce effectively; power over another manifests sometimes through physical, brutal force, sometimes through the ability to give or withhold something which is needed by another.

Initially, provisions of a constitution are generally manifestations of some in power protecting their position in the event that they lose some measure of the power they currently hold. In regulating government in this way, those in power lose some of their power, but they gain some protection from each other.

Later, provisions of a constitution can be the result of pressure from those governed to receive priveleges and protections in exchange for support of the government. These priveleges and protections are seen as rights. Those in power lose some advantage over those they govern, but need to maintain less force to retain their position. These rights will only be enforced as long as the governed maintain the pressure on the government to enforce it. When the enforcement of that right no longer eases the difficulty of governing, the government will cease to recognize the right. A right does not exist if it is not defended.

Americans have their eye on the possibility of extreme luxury, and see the American dream as the right to pursue extreme wealth. This is the right they pursue to the exclusion of other basic rights. The right to pursue wealth does not guarantee the attainment of it, but it does set up a situation where one supports the rights of one's superiors to oppress one, and results in a lack of pressure on the American government to make sure that the society is regulated to serve the society as a whole.

Comments (0)     

My sustainability show opened last Friday at the downtown Collegetown Bagels cafe in Ithaca. Hung in an organized way, and with an audience to perform to, it was very satisfying to see how all the parts of the exhibition flow together to support a complete idea, and how the idea stands quietly by itself, independent and not in opposition to the alternatives.

Last week, I began to write about something I had been told Lady GaGa said to Vogue magazine about choosing to remain celibate now for fear that others would steal her creativity through her vagina. Somehow that assertion is comforting to me, not for its paranoid sound, nor for its interpretation that distractions would take from the art, but for the idea that one must step back from the inspiration of one's work in the process of representing it in a slightly altered form in an infinitely more interesting way.

I saw an interview of Lady GaGa over the weekend, which reinforced the impression I have of her from her music; that there is a complete, rich, and beautiful underworld that she reveals through her work. The world is there, independent of the commonly presented reality; she lives in it, and shares it in a generous, positive way. To me, this is the positive power of art, in which I would hope to participate.

Tied to the interview was a showing of the videos which are associated with the music. Seeing the videos together, and realizing that none of the videos are an obvious (and I think not initial) representation of the music for Lady GaGa, it makes me happy to to see how flexible statements already made can be(come). The music expresses sets of ideas itself. The music video opens up new possibilities for the nature of the ideas expressed, and the speech about the work expresses something else. The combination opens up a view of an other reconstructed world, where things are just different enough to help us see a place we might take in this one.

Comments (0)     

I leave the house most mornings to drink my coffee in public at a local cafe. I construct my day there; drawing, writing, reading.

As I have gotten older, my consumption of coffee has diminished to twenty ounces, consumed at one sitting, in the morning. I carry an Ecomug to avoid drinking out of disposable cups; drinking from a permanent cup makes the ritual better, carrying the cup with me makes it worse. Twenty ounces in such a container spans one and a half cups. Sometimes I do without the half cup and my day suffers as a consequence.

Often the drawing and writing I do, as I drink my coffee, gives a structure to my day as an architect; working out solutions to my design problems of the day before, to be instituted when I get back to my office;  it is not practical problem solving, but a process of altering the context surrounding the issue to construct a world in which the problem is not one.

I have collected a body of this thinking into a series of panels which will be hung in the cafe where I drink my coffee. The panels represent an architecture planned in total, constructed over time to accommodate many cycles of human living. The panels reside in a world which accepts the progress of events, but seeks to establish a place which does not need to be replaced in order to accommodate. The panels will be hung at Collegtown Bagels at the corner of Aurora and Seneca Streets in Ithaca during the month of August. The opening of the show is Friday 6 August at 5PM.

Comments (0)