Time was, when we did not have an empty nest, our kids would drag the tree across the fields to the house. In those days, to build character, you drag the tree by hand. Now that we are older, we think that we have enough character. So the photo shows our new Yuletide tradition. Peace to you in this season of renewal.
Virginia, our daughter, ran the NYC Marathon yesterday with a time of 4:26. The photo was taken just after she finished, with Teresa, who has run two NYC Marathons. As you may know, Virginia is an architect working for a boutique firm in the City. We are very proud of her dedication, as well as her fundraising efforts which were required for her to run in the race.
Riding our bikes around Montreal, one daylong loop took us unexpectedly past Habitat. This is the housing complex designed by Moshe Sadie for Expo 67. While in previous trips to Montreal we have dutifully made pilgrimages to this holy shrine of architecture, yesterday, it hit us with a fresh delight.
Everywhere we travel, new housing is being built. Typically, these buildings are 5-10 stories and are configured in a long, low form. And they all look the same. The materials are the same. The ins and outs of the facades are basically the same. New housing in Louisville looks exactly like that being built in Montreal. The sameness makes it all mediocre and boring.
Which only throws the concept of Habitat into a whole new light. This was built in 1967. That’s 50 years ago! While all of the units are identical, there is a fantastic organic quality to the form. It looks like it grew that way, and possibly may be still growing. There is visual interest. All have rooftop terraces. It is a response to the creation of a sense of community for human beings. The organicism is designed to promote human to human interaction. And all of the units were prefabricated, which is a response to efficiency, cost and technology.
Much has been written about Habitat, most of which can be found online. Not everything that you read will be positive. What continues to endure for us is the fusion of human need with technology, thereby creating a human centered environment for living.
Lawn Drawing is done with a mower. You inscribe a pattern, or shape, into your lawn. As the grass grows over the summer, your creation is enriched. We started doing this a couple of summers ago. And on bike rides thru the countryside, we see that others most likely have been doing this for longer than we have.
When you employ Lawn Drawing, you achieve two things right off the bat. First, you have an interesting thing to look at rather than just a boring lawn. And second, you immediately reduce your carbon footprint: the less grass you cut, the less pollution you give off.
So we thought it would be fun to start to document these Lawn Drawings. These few, initial, examples are to be seen only as a starter. Please feel free to send to us other examples of Lawn Drawings, which we will add to what we hope will be a compendium of this expressive format.
Teresa and I have now ridden our bicycles around all of the Finger Lakes. This has been a 14 year project. Our first lake was Keuka, which we circumnavigated in 2007. That was so much fun that it occurred to us that we could ride around all of them. As time and desire permitted, we would then drive out and ride around another lake. This past weekend, we finished with Hemlock Lake.
We absolutely love the Finger Lakes region. There is an incredible mix of working farms, local traditions, and urban centers. Generally, you are in continual visual contact with the lake. And most of the rides take you to high elevations, where you see the landscape rolling to the distance. Each lake ride has its own feel. Some are very developed with lake house after lake house. Others are predominantly rural and agricultural. Hemlock Lake, for example, has no visible development because it is surrounded by State lands.
And we love the history that has taken place in the region, which includes Women’s Suffrage, the Burned Over District, etc.
We rode around each lake contiguously. Most lakes took a day. Some, we did two lakes in one day. And Cayuga, as it is a 90 mile ride, we took two days, which involved the complex logistics of dropping off stuff at the hotel in Ithaca, driving to Seneca Falls at North end of the lake, riding down to Ithaca, spending the night, riding back up the next day to the car, and then driving back down to Ithaca to get our stuff.
The absolute best way to see a landscape is by bicycle. We were continually stopping to take photos of buildings and forms. A bicycle makes stopping, snapping a photo, and then continuing very easy. We have hundreds of reference photos from these rides.
I spend a lot of time riding my bike on the back roads. And it just seems that everyone has no trespassing signs posted on their property. It also seems that there are more and more of these signs all the time. Sure, everyone has a right to do that. But is it really that important? Are we really that concerned about where our boundaries are? Plus, when the signs are as dense as in the photo above, it starts to look junky.
I slammed on the brakes when I saw this assembly on Route 166 just south of our farm.
The garage is properly stick built. It is rooted to the ground and bolted to a slab. It was built in place. It has a relatively high authenticity. This is where the vehicle lives.
The house is modular. It is floating and unattached to the ground. It was built elsewhere, and brought to the site in two pieces. It could have been built on Mars. It has low authenticity. This is where the humans live.
Is this telling us something? Is this a commentary regarding the evolution of machines and of humans? Is this, truly, the state of the art? Does this metaphorically say that humans, with our technology, are increasingly unmoored to the planet? Or is this saying that the vehicles have greater value than do humans, given the vehicles have a more authentic building? If this triggers an association with you, we would love to hear about it. The floating house / anchored garage is simply too good to ignore.
This did provide the impetus for a fantasy. The garage might be seen as the root, anchored into the ground. And the house might be seen as the leaves, gently oscillating in the breeze.
This winter was fantastic. We’re guessing that the snow was on the ground, continually, for around 10 weeks. This allowed for XC just about any day you wanted. We were able to maintain the same track set thru the fields. Every time there was new snow, we were usually able to ski over the old trail. As we did, we kept compressing the snow in the tracks. As the snow was melting, the denser snow in the tracks is the last to go.
We are happy to announce that Kurt’s book, Transparent Drawing, is now available in the US. Published by Black Dog Press in the UK, it attempts to provide a new mode of knowledge about form. To do this, the book offers a set of analogue tools and concepts which anyone can use to think about form and design in a new way. Historical precedents for the theory are also extensively linked.
The idea for Transparent Drawing sprang from my daily sketches here in the office. In a direct way, it is a manifestation of our practice in Cooperstown. So you might say that Altonview is powered by Transparent Drawing.
Does it get any better than this? We have had weeks with these exact conditions. Skiing in the fields yesterday was just about perfect. And what does the image look like to you? Maybe an underwater organism? Think of Haeckel’s Kunstform der Natur. Or maybe it was some sort of unclassified creature, like a turtle propelling itself across the sand.
