New definitions of beauty in a world or fakery

I was at an architectural products show the other week in SF with the same old stands of windows, paver, doors, lights, cladding, roofing, etc. The thing that hit me the most was how fake and tawdry everything looked. Every roof tile seemed to be a cartoon-version of medieval Tuscany formed out of cement-based Ryevita. Every paver some Martian-dust material divorced from any stone ever found. All pretty depressing. The building industry has converged with the food industry by mimicking the way Cargill and others take low-value corn products and mold them into endless morsels that almost pass for dinner.

And of course my caring credentials go down the drain if I were to 'like' any natural stone from some unsustained source, or favor a timber that doesn't have growth-rings smaller than my thumb.

But of all the mush-together products, I am in awe of Parallam. Several timber manufacturers have created composite timber beams that glue together small thinings of wood into strucutral beams. They're usually used as beams and lintels, hidden in the strucutral of the building, but I love them as they are. Their cross-section is something like Mousaka/lasagna, they're not attempting to be something they're not, they wear their green-credentials on their surface.

Lot's of designers have enjoyed Parallam's qualities too, making stair treads, furniture, woodcarvings, etc. from the beam stock. Let's hope we don't find later that the glue is toxic or the beams fail after ten years......

Sacred and Profane

Bayfront Park juts into the salt ponds of the San Francisco Bay on the eastern edge of Menlo Park. It's popular with bird watchers, dog walkers, slow runners, model plane flyers, etc. It's a nice spot, but it's all reclaimed land built over a huge trash heap.

The fact that inches below your california native grasses is the sum-total of post-consumer cast-offs is either wonderful (fantastic reclamation and an example of making something beautiful from a dump) or strangely unsettling. I've spoken to several people who don't go to the park 'in principle.' Not that they openly have objections to the park, but their preference suggests that they're not happy with walking across a rubbish tip.

We talk about 'sacred' and 'profane' places/spaces as architects. Is a park over a dump by definition a 'profane' space for many people. Does this go for battlefields? Notorious historic sites? Does the Feng Shui master or the Indian dream-spirit-master-whatever agree? If you attempt to live in the present, live in the moment, then you can take the park as it is, regardless of it's past life.

But if a measure of respect for a place is whether or not dog owners clean up their poop or not, the park still seems to be held in contempt.

accidental memories

I endlessly seem to come across bits of mature trees left when pruning left too long finally happens. Fences and overhead cables host these 'lost limbs' which have grown around the fixed object. Do people see these in the same light as the pairs of shoes slung over telephone lines?

I try to imagine what the missing tree might have been, like an archeologist imagining an entire pot, city, or culture by just finding one shard.

What if once we were dead and gone, we all left one piece of ourselves still attached to where we lived. An amputated hand permanently attached a handrail at the library; a foot on one pedal of a used bike being sold on; an elbow glued to the armrest of a used car.

Chris Jordan Photos

Chris Jordan's photos of dead albatross carcasses found on Midway Island have been doing the rounds of museums throughout the US. Needless to say, they're beautiful/horrible images. That understanding of how you will be outlived by your Happy Meal toy hit me immediately.

'And I will show you fear in a handful of........plastic?'

(apologies to TS Eliot)