What Americans Eat

What Americans eat: a steady diet of television. And: 1 in 5 meals eaten in the car.

Killed your TV?

TV // America // Democrazy

Technorati Tags: America, Democrazy, television, TV

San Jose’s City Hall: California futurism

What we have here is the long-awaited “Future” as realized by architect Richard Meier in San Jose, California's new City Hall — finished in 2005, photographed here in 2008:

It's found at 200 East Santa Clara Street in San Jose, California (Google map) — the so-called “Capital of Silicon Valley.”

As always, start at Wikipedia for more info about San Jose City Hall.

Technorati Tags: architecture, California, RichardMeier, SanJose

The nasty, brutish and short lives of great-great-grandparents?

Idea for a photo project: take portraits of my friends that are pseudo-documentary in style, where they are dressed and posed as though they were their ancestors at their same age. For example, I could photograph Almudena dressed as her grandmother in 1938 at age 33 in Salamanca, Spain, with her many children gathered around her, in the street before their rural Spanish household, chickens at their feet, a mule-drawn cart at their side. I could photograph Sheri as a peasant field worker outside Shanghai, China in 1935, standing ankle-deep in a rice paddy, her children also participating in the planting. I could photograph Jon as a watch-maker in 1920's Vienna, Matt as a sheep herder in the green hills of Scotland, Nadine as a fisherman's wife living on a fjord in Norway, and Billy as a corn-cob smoking Georgia sharecropper.  I could also photograph people as their great-great-grandparents, revealing an even more dramatic shift away from our present modern condition, to show earlier times and modes of living.

You really do have to go back to the great-great grandparents (for me, anyway) to see what I might call the pre-modern world. The lives of my great-great-grandparents were far removed from my own, theirs being a generation before my own grandfather's initiation into the modern condition: France of World War I, where he served as a machine-gunner. World War I was the event that brought us industrial-scale killing, where battlefields bristled with the products of mass industry: airplanes, bombs, tanks, long range artillery, bullet-spitting machine guns, clouds of poison gas, caustically combined with pre-industrial trench style warfare. The result was a scale of carnage that the world simply hadn't seen before — more than 9 million soldiers and civilians killed, primarily in Europe, in the 4 years between 1914 and 1918.

What and when exactly was the split from pre-modern to modern? It depends on where and who you’re talking about. The Dutch were urbanized in Manhattan by 1820, easily, but at that same time, peasants in China and Spain were probably equally pre-modern, living their perhaps nasty, brutish and short lives in isolated agrarain societies.

Which brings me to my next question: where can I read a good accounting of how the “average man” lived in previous centuries? What was life like for someone born in 1830, 1730, 1630, 1530, 1430, 1330?

Designed to Confuse? The Disorienting Abundance of Global Consumerism

R.I.P. $4.99. Made In China.

In 1989, I accidentally damaged my toaster oven, a Black & Decker. After the accident, the oven would get hot only very slowly, and it wasn't very good at toasting. But it worked enough to keep, and I didn't want to trash something I had just bought a year ago. So I kept using it, until the spring of 2005.

While doing some minor improvements on my apartment, I decided to ditch the toaster oven and buy something that actually toasted well. I gave the oven away on Craigslist.com, and began searching. In the meantime, I've been toasting bread by putting it on a cookie sheet into the oven. It probably takes a lot more electricity to do it that way — it must be very inefficient to heat a full-sized oven just to toast 2 slices of bread.

Then I set out to buy a toaster oven. I went to a bunch of major shops to look: Bed Bath & Beyond, Target, Costco, Best Buy, Amazon. I don't really buy much in my life, so when it comes time to do some really mainstream consumption, I'm not sure where to look. I spent time in Target for the first time a couple of months ago and had my mind blown by the awesome array of goods. I didn't realize how far along mass consumption had come since I grew up  in 1970s Connecticut.

In my search for a toaster oven (still unfulfilled), I learned a few things about how our modern global consumption works. First, everything is made in China. Second, you can get things that look fantastic, like they would be shown in a design museum. Third, some things are really poorly designed — not only ugly to behold, but hard to use, or dangerous, or inconvenient, or unusual; as design has become cheaper and cheaper, more of it is done by hacks and now the consumer good market is flooded with poorly designed junk. Fourth, everything feels shabby, like it'll work for a couple of years, and then it will break, and you'll just throw it away.

Like my Ikea garlic press, which was of an elegant modernist design consisting of two long parallel cylinders (the handles) intersected at one end by a stout cylinder (the cavity in which to put garlic). It worked fine for a year, then one day the entire metal grate just broke off. Cast metal had given out under the force of my one hand and a little white vegetable. R.I.P. $4.99. Made In China.

 

On my search for a new toaster oven, I learned that the toaster oven is growing in size just as the American waistline. Where they used to be designed to fit two, maybe three pieces of toast, now they're huge, and they're marketed with such pitches as "€œBig Enough To Hold An Extra-Large Pizza!" or "€œCook A 32-pound Thanksgiving Turkey!"€ They're not toaster ovens anymore, they're Ovens with a big O, gigantic counter-space hogging broiling behemoths. They're S.U.V.s, Hummers, when a little two-seater is all I really need.

More than anything, the feeling I got while shopping was that this is all too much. Too many choices, too large, too much design (too much of it bad), too little thought put into good functionality, too many variables. Too confusing — or, as someone once wrote, it's so easy that even a three-year old could do it with the help of an electrician.

Global consumerism and the capitalist system have enabled us to inexpensively outfit our lives in beautiful design with devices of every convenience. I can choose from hundreds of ways to make toast. I can get online and read reviews (real? Or planted by shills for the manufacturers?), I can go to   chain stores and inspect a dozen models up close. I can walk away, as I have for the past month, distrustful of an item so obviously designed to be disposable. 

UPDATE May 15, 2007: My search for a toaster oven has ended with the acquisition of an old-school model from the 1960s. My friend gave me her old toaster oven, a General Electric Deluxe Toast-R-Oven. It was the toaster oven her parents had in the home she grew up in, 1970s San Francisco. The thing is solid as a rock, and works perfectly every single time. Best of all, it’s small, just fitting two slices of toast. Small enough to keep in a cabinet and use in place, and only have to plug in when I use it.

America's most dangerous drug

Technorati Tags: America, democracy, drug, media, television

The only good Victorian is a gutted and modernized Victorian

I'm no fan of the Victorian housing stock that covers large parts of San Francisco. While it's preferable to the offensively bland homes built between the Victorian era and our current embrace of modernism, the catacombs of most Victorian homes in San Francisco make for weird and unpleasant living spaces.

In comes architect John Maniscalco, who has taken an 1910 Victorian in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood, and dropped in a two-story tall glass-walled lightshaft:

This solves one of the worst problems of homes built on San Francisco's tight urban grid: no windows on the sides of the home, making for dark interior rooms. While some Victorians have side lightwells, Maniscalco's solution goes much further.

The architect has removed the sidewells, flattening out those indents in the walls, and instead carved out a floor-penetrating lightwell in the center. From the photo above, you can see that there are doors on at least two sides of the glass cube, allowing residents to open that cube for fresh air. Brilliant!

Here's what the architect told the San Francisco Chronicle:

“A number of light wells at the perimeter were more constricting than opening in many ways. The idea of giving light and air a spatial center extended the space. While we took space from the center, we added a greater sense of space.”

See the whole story New life in the West: Cubism within a Victorian brings uncommon comfort and light by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Zahid Sardar.

* * *

A look around the architect's Web site reveals that he is also responsible for the “mixed-use residential building” being built on 22nd Street in the Mission, next to the building where Boogaloo's is. Here's a rendering from his site:

However, the last time I looked at the construction site, it appeared that work was pretty much on hold. I wonder what the story is — do any of you readers know what's going on with this project?

22nd Street, by the way — best damn street in the Mission!

Technorati Tags: 22ndStreet, mission, MissionDistrict, JohnManiscalco, SanFrancisco, Victorian, WesternAddition

Cactus moderne: 618 Carolina Street, Potrero Hill

Here's a recent remodel on San Francisco's Potrero Hill:

618, 620 and 622 Carolina Street is about as fine a modern city home (for three families) that I've seen built in years. Generous balconies allow for the outdoor living so often possible in this sunny side of town. The monumental cactii Euphorbias add a Palm Springs Moderne flair to the streetscape, and the garage door follows our currently developing tradition of using wood in modern façades. There's also a nice use of industrial materials in the black metal railings and especially in that trellis at top, which will probably be covered in hanging purple wisteria in a few years. All in all, a fine addition to our neighborhood.

Technorati Tags: modern, modernarchitecture, moderndesign, modernism, PotreroHill, SanFrancisco

Ikea's Dirigent shelving // the aluminum workspace

UPDATE 2007: See more info about this desk at my other post » "Ikea's Vika Inge legs by Olle Lundberg: aluminum is the metal of modernism?"

At one point in the evolution of my work space, I put my Apple 23“ Cinema Display onto a shelf in Ikea's wall-mounted Dirigent shelving, while I nestled my Ikea frosted-glass table beneath. My Powerbook sat on a ”Powertray“ which  I designed and built.  My speakers (KRK V6's, self-powered studio monitors) sat on another Ikea piece — an oak veneered cube with a frosted glass door, set on thin steel legs. It made for a handsome and efficient work setup, but I was locked into the one location because of the relative permanence of fixing the Dirigent shelving to the wall. This was the height of my Aluminum Period.

My PowerTray (patent pending):

After a few months of living with this setup, I began my apartment remodel/restoration/pimp-job. I put so much work into smoothing out the walls that, after I painted, I didn't want to make holes to mount the shelving. I stopped using the Dirigent shelves and rested the display right on the table top (now attached to a G5 PowerMac).

Here's my workspace after finishing the remodel:

While the orange wall as my office backdrop was a huge improvement over the nasty off-white this apartment was originally painted, I didn't achieve a significant space-mind breakthrough until only a few weeks ago when, for the first time, I placed my workspace directly in front of my living room window. After more than six  years of working from home (you have not known cabin fever until…), I finally got wise enough to shift my perspective 90 degrees.

Now I have the great urban outdoors as my backdrop.


Which is especially cool because I get to watch the vast psychedelic lightshows in the sky that unfold most days in San Francisco:

See more info about this desk at my other post » "Ikea's Vika Inge legs by Olle Lundberg: aluminum is the metal of modernism?"

Technorati Tags: dirigent, HomeOffice, ikea, macintosh, moon, moonrise, PowerBook, Powertray, SanFrancisco, setups

interior design // more or less

See the Flickr photoset: interior design // more or less »

(I got written up in Apartment Therapy today....)

Technorati Tags: ApartmentTherapy, MidCenturyModern, modern, moderndesign

Julius Shulman (Case Study House photographer) speaks at Art Center College of Design, Nov. 4, 2006

As part of The Gamble House's lecture series, “legendary architectural photographer Julius Shulman will discuss his body of work, including his recent project photographing the newly renovated Getty Villa in Malibu. Since 1936 Shulman has been the visual recorder of modern designs throughout 45 states of the country and internationally.”

We know him best as the photographer of Case Study House #22 and the iconic image which he created, showing this masterpiece of modernism hovering over the Los Angeles cityscape.

Shulman, who celebrated his 96th birthday on October 10, was recently commissioned to re-photograph Case Study House #21, which will be sold through auction on December 3, 2006.

Also on Le Blog Exuberance:

• Case Study House #21 ~ buy your own Pierre Koenig pad
• Meeting Pierre Koenig in Case Study House #22
• Case Study Number 22 / mashup

Technorati Tags: architecture, CaseStudy, CaseStudyHouse21, CaseStudyHouseNumber22, LosAngeles, modernarchitecture, modernism, PierreKoenig, JuliusShulman