News

I have a whole bunch of posts in the works, many of which are waiting for one thing or another to go up, but in the meantime, a couple of interesting items.

First of all, definitely check out Charlie Rose's interview with Ada Louise Huxtable. I haven't agreed with everything she's said, but there's no question she is the preeminent architectural critic in the United States and possibly this entire hemisphere. It's a wonderful and charming conversation they have, and it's delightful to listen to her.

I found a few interesting connections in my research for work. Her late husband was the industrial designer Leonard Garth Huxtable (1911-1989). It's that he designed the Opera Café at the Metropolitan Opera House, which was allegedly replaced by their live broadcasting facilities in the late-1980s. He started out working with the Immortal Norman Bel Geddes. While with Bel Geddes, he was a member of the design team that created General Motors' landmark Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair.

--Photo courtesy the Discovery Channel.

He worked for GM for a while in Detroit, and then returned to New York to work at the office of Henry Dreyfuss, another colossus in the world of industrial design. Later he founded his own firm. He designed the delegate's desks and chairs and lounge furniture for the United Nations, a project led by Wallace Harrison (as was the opera house and to some extent the '39 World's Fair). He also created the glassware, china, and serving pieces for Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant. It's sort of very funny and ironic how much Ada Louise seems to hate Johnson's AT&T (Sony) Building. That's one thing I don't agree with; I think it's gorgeous and perfect.

Slightly related to my recent plumbing/ water purification rant, there's also this extremely interesting article about vertical farming in urban locations that recently showed up in the New York Times. I highly recommend it and hope the ideas put forth become a reality not too long from now.

I also had to show you the Corvette Rondine by Pininfarina, which debuted around 1963 and just recently came onto the market in California. It's absolutely exquisite:

Click them for slightly larger.

--Photos courtesy the New York Times.

Gimme.

©2009, Ryan Witte

Outdoor Living

Here's another young company from Toronto doing a lot of promising work, they go by the name of HERO Design Lab. First I want to show you these amazing prototypes they did in collaboration with NOTCOT that I definitely hope they put into production. They're called "Tiki and Gnomes":

The gnome is a video projector and the tikis are speaker stands that look sort of like very stylized trees. It's an outdoor theater set up, designed to be completely weatherproof and all that. This is such a fantastic idea, I can't believe there aren't more things like this on the market. All they need is a giant movie screen that unfolds from another gnome (or whatever) at the press of a button, and they're good to go.

From HERO alone, there's the DR-1 Drying Rack:

It folds practically flat, but has more than enough racks and bars to handle your entire laundry load.

It cuts down on the energy used by your dryer, which I think has obvious benefits. Clothes dryers consume more energy than practically any other household appliance aside from your water heater, between 1800 and 5000 watts. Beyond that, it's a good argument that clothes should be more fresh if dried out in a soft summer breeze. If it were me, I think I'd want it in the shade, however, to avoid the clothes fading.

The item that really caught my eye was the RC-1 Rain Collector. They offer it in yellow and white to match the Drying Rack, but personally I prefer it in brown and white:

You put it under the drain spout from your gutters and it holds 45 gallons. If you live somewhere other than New York City, I'd imagine for the most part rainwater would be relatively safe for just about anything but drinking it, but they suggest watering the garden, washing your car, and washing the dog, all perfectly good ideas.

And this seems a good excuse to talk about something else. I'm on a bit of a water kick lately. I have begun in earnest collecting the water that drips from my upstairs neighbors' air conditioner. It is essentially nothing more than distilled water, which theoretically should be quite pure. I actually have a dissolved solids meter to test it for impurities--I know, kind of a weird thing to have, but my mom gave it to me. I have to replace the batteries in it first, though. Evidently the water from air conditioners can be somewhat saline, but I've been watering plants with it and they seem to be fine.

I'm wondering, if every drop of water from every air conditioner in New York City--and for that matter, refrigerators as well--was collected over the entire summer, how much water do you suppose that would be? How much less water would have to be pumped down from upstate New York?

I got to thinking further on the subject, and it occurred to me that plumbing needs to become much more sophisticated. This isn't ancient Rome; we're a planet in crisis. I think we're a little too smart for the basic water in/ water out principle of plumbing. Not every source of water in a building needs to be 100% sanitary, just the ones where it may end up in your mouth. In many other cases, a good quality water heater that heats water to near the boiling point is going to take care of all the rest of the bacteria. There is absolutely no reason why 99% of the "waste water" we produce can't be used for flushing toilets. Toilet water just should not be taken from the purified water supply, period. In fact, I'm beginning to think that the only water that should go right into the sewer is from the toilet.

I also recently heard about Planet Ark's Aware laundry detergent, which is so natural and biodegrades so quickly that you can use, at the very least, water from the rinse cycle to water your garden. Of course, you couldn't really expect a homeowner to use this, for Aware to always remain on the market or always be readily available. Perhaps washer run-off could have a valve to switch depending on where the water should go.

I'm thinking more about distillation, too. I'm thinking an entire house can basically be a water collection and recycling system. For instance, say you have a cistern for gray water, necessarily at ground level due to gravity. Every drop of rain that hits the house, every pipe leads there, every drop of water. Then you have a solar system heating the water, the water vapor travels up a pipe or something to a condensation panel in the attic, dripping into another cistern, and clean, distilled water is stored up there, maybe with an added pump for increased water pressure. There's still the problem of bacteria, and not all impurities are removed by distillation, but I'll let someone else worry about that.

What's left at the bottom after the water distills off? Cleaning products, remnants of food, skin cells, saliva and hair, cosmetics? What's to be done with this disgusting sludge? I can't help but believe there would have to be a combination of different enzymes, bacteria, and maybe things like algae that could absorb most of those substances and convert them to some useful byproduct.

And for that matter, what about toilet water? Certainly no one would want to know that their drinking water once contained their own pee and poop. I have been to houses, however, with leaky septic tanks and on-property wells where brushing one's teeth was not quite as minty of an experience as I might have liked. But why can't houses, in the backyard, for instance, have some kind of natural, biological system to mostly purify that water so that it could just be safely drained into the surrounding landscape? Again, I'd think there'd be a combination of plant species that would absolutely thrive on the nasties in toilet water.

It might be a tougher sell for us greedy Americans than even global warming. But less than three percent of the water on earth is fresh water. Two of that three percent is inaccessible, being frozen into ice caps and glaciers, being in parts of the world where no one lives, or running right back into the oceans. The potentially potable water we have is less than one percent of all the water on the planet. The United Nations considers us to be in a "water crisis." Gas isn't the only thing we're guzzling.

©2009, Ryan Witte

Uh Oh

Another designer I found this year to be doing some incredibly clever things was Brooklyn's Jason Miller. His work has the most amazing sense of humor, but it's also extremely intelligent on a number of levels. Stylistically, it's along the lines of designers I noticed over the past few years celebrating forgotten and often discarded icons of pop culture, like John Paul Plauche's reDO chair. But Miller has gone even further. His work is all about damage, decay, overuse/misuse, and mistakes, and he ends up making a brilliantly poignant statement about Consumerism.

First off, here's a mirror that looks like it's broken and taped back together using Scotch tape, appropriately called "ScotchMagic":

Click for larger.

It's actually all made out of glass, what looks like tape is just frosted glass. I decided to start with that one because that's Miller, himself, admiring his reflection.

In a similar vein, here are some "Beautifully Broken" vases:

They're ordinary glass vases, broken and glued back together again using an epoxy of a different color, to highlight the cracks. I'm assuming this is something like a puzzle trying to piece them back together again. These would all obviously be one-of-a-kind, as well.

These are "Whatever Flowerpots":

They're made of terra cotta, but in the shape of temporary, improvisational things people use to hold plants, like a two-liter plastic soda bottle with the top cut off.

One of my favorite pieces of his is the "Duct Tape Chair":

They're upholstered with normal fabric, and the "duct tape" is actually strips of leather stitched on. It kind of reminds me of a bunch of great images a friend recently emailed me from There, I Fixed It. Also, by the way, I really think someone should make tape with ducks on it and wire that has "Bob" printed on it. Those mispeelings are big pet peeves of mine, but I think it'd be funny.

Here's the "Dusty Table":

Miller's position is that your table is just going to get dusty anyway, so may as well celebrate that. What appears to be dust is part of the finish.

This might really drive a neat-freak with OCD absolutely insane, but that's the most beautiful thing about this. It's the kind of thing that elicits an almost emotional reaction. There's something very deeply psychological about this; it creates a frustrating impasse with one's desire to run for a rag and the Lemon Pledge that can't ever be resolved. It also begs an interesting question about our ingrained reactions to dust, dirt, and grime, although I'm not sure what the answer is. Going further, he's used a quality that might never be generally thought of as connoting Beauty, that is, "dirtiness" and used it as an aesthetic gesture. Then there's the "forgotten" connotations of a piece of furniture left unattended to gather dust--and would a beautiful, prized piece of furniture be left so unattended? It creates this very sharp contrast with how that very quality makes it beg for attention, especially if located smack in the middle of an otherwise relatively clean kitchen, for instance (not mine). It's truly brilliant.

Here's the "Messy Couch":

"My couch always looks like this. Why fight it?" Miller's website says. All the cushions are either too big or too small, and all of them different from the rest. Here it's a bit more obviously intentional, but someone still might have that desire to flip the cushions around to their "correct" position so they'd line up. Presumably the attempt would be unsuccessful, unsatisfying, and somewhat funny to watch as they get angrier and angrier.

I think my top favorite has to be the "Mismatch Chair":

I'm just going to quote Miller here, because he explains it so perfectly.

Notes for the upholsterer:

It shouldn't take 7 yards of fabric to cover this chair. It's not that big.

I bought 3 yards. Please make it work.

I don't care if the pattern lines up. It's not important.

If you run out, finish it with some remnants.

Awesome. This is really doing so many things. It's almost Deconstructivism, first of all, which I love. It focuses your attention on the upholstery process, itself, on the ways that furniture is manufactured, and does so by celebrating errors. Secondly, it's a study in the conservation of resources. One is compelled to ask, what does happen to all the remnants from normally wasteful upholstery work? Is this yet more tons of fodder for our overtaxed landfills?

But Miller could have done this with a fabric that had no pattern, and only other upholsterers would likely have noticed that the weave was not matching up. "We conserved fabric on this chair" would be great, but how boring! He's instead made it the defining statement of the piece. This is exactly how we need to start thinking about design. On a grander scale, we need to start thinking of the visual characteristics that result from smart, sustainable design as being the very characteristics that make the pieces distinctly "beautiful."

©2009, Ryan Witte