Welcome to Saved by Design
New Stuff:
In Home Page: An Hour With Paul Goldberger
In A Miracle Of Coincidence: “It is finished.”
In A Year In Lent: Only Consistency Allows Change
In Random Stuff: Pearl Harbor
In Absence: Easters
In Left To Myself: A Decade In Memory
In Emily’s Days: Coda
In Not (As) Fat: One Meal A Day
In Finding Home: Occupation Preoccupation
In The Rules: 1) Plan. 2) Section. 3) Elevation
In Silence In Spring: Astonishing
In Days ’till Spring: “Karening”
every nothing
given Everything
nothing is a gift
the angers
and fear
and reasons
mean nothing, too
each
is a rescue –
no victim, but living
in a place
we did not make
but are given.
it is hard to accept.
nothing meant
me
on me
mirrors
but mirror
reflection
happens away from distraction
intent
ends transparency
Crackers & Grape Juice
…the world is there
…the world is there
whether you are
or not
I know too much
to get out of my own way
fighting death
a man works out
laughing
and talking
to a plug
In his ear
there is
a pay phone
on the road
after the war
silence
the smell
of time
left with ourselves
alone
the passion
now dim
knows no triumph
only survival
or not
Ugly HOME?
LIVE! NOON! Thursday May 25! WPKN 89.5fm – STREAMING WPKN.org
Are There More Ugly Buildings?
The internet has exposed everything all the time: and the florid marketing language promoting designs washes over every self-promotion: and when the built reality is simply banal, arbitrary, even ugly the word hyperbole celebrates sad buildings. What you could drive by becomes a screaming posturing marketing shill:
Is this just the normal posturing of the trends of marketing and design cool that has happened since architecture became part of popular culture – or has the internet connection taken ideas of designers and instantly turned them into cliches to be cut-and-pasted into a building? Has the universal CAD drawing of everything made our buildings quilts of prefabricated images, versus a woven, interactive composition? Will Artificial Intelligence take the a-la-cart method of random tacking of hyped pieces so easy that our buildings first shock, then exhaust, ultimately become noise to our culture?
So, are there more ugly buildings being built, or are all buildings just fully promoted on the free and universal internet, where once editors, design juries and writers selected what we saw beyond our car?
There are palpable examples of using hype to market buildings, rather than spend the time (and money) to think about how our buildings change to adapt to the moment and each building’s context.
There are a growing number of spontaneous infections of black roof rashes of solar panels are disfiguring even the most quaint and cute homes all around us.
Black trim has become the Goth Mascara of unending homes as architectural make-up goes bold to get attention, and project a body image problem acting out in cosmetics.
The stick frame over podium box buildings have continued to metastasize and wedge themselves into neighborhoods that once had variety.
Our homes cannot contain the tumorous growths of garages that dominate the public face of new homes, once one, then two, now three gaping cankers are in full control of many home’s sites.
As with any Building Boom in America, the gentle, modest buildings that deferred to neighborhoods are being murdered, torn down and replaced by maxxed-out construction on steroids exploding in cacophonies of architectural cliches.
Exteriors that were once rational manipulations of a building’s shape have gone from simple skins to become enflamed with rashes of four, no, seven materials, colors, patterns – all in collision.
Join an incredible group of those who have thought long and hard about aesthetics and culture: historian and architect Witold Rybczynski- https://www.witoldrybczynski.com/ , Architecture Editor Martin Pedersen – https://commonedge.org/ , Home design writer and editor Peter Chapman, who was at Taunton Press for thirty years – https://www.taunton.com/ and architect and writer Steve Mouzon – https://originalgreen.org/ >
life, and
they had us
when memory was
not knowing
was what they knew
now is not then
then either
what happens to the hole
when your foot leaves the water
When God Was Not There
Five and a half years ago, on my way into New York, a Peekskill, New York police officer told me they had found my sibling’s body, in her bed. She had not returned to work, where she never left, and was found lifeless in her home.
Her home had become a hoarder’s refuge, without access to the unusable bath and kitchen, filled with refuse. But when discovered it had carefully detoxed of her endless cigarette butts or rotting garbage amid feet of stacked refuse. Her careful preparation, included an opened letter from me from a decade prior (never answered, as no connection attempt ever was) laid open under a lit lamp over a pile of unopened notes from me was left for me to find. One last connection.
The picture above shows a 14 year old Win Dickinson in 1964. The year before he had quit the small private school my parents had supported for their children as the public schools, the schools my parents attended, were deemed “second rate” by them. My father had become Chairman of the school’s Board of Directors, and that day was handing out diplomas to the graduating 8th grade class. My brother’s class before he pleaded after 7th grade “I just can’t take it.” And, to my my parents, validated the ruling from his grades in grammar school that he was “second rate”. My parents let him quit, but forced him to attend what was to be his graduation. My sister was also in academic crisis, quitting The Master’s School a month before her high school graduation the year before, driving herself to California.
I was quietly in 3rd grade.
My parent’s world had failed them. Their children were not them, two Ivy League suburban survivors of Depression and World War 2. My brother came to have failed careers, college, marital and religious efforts. He told me once that “God showed me that He was my father.” He then, somehow, left the church he had devoted himself to. Somehow he had failed that Father, too.
In a last salvation, Winthrop fully transitioned (with the inheritance from the parents he failed) to become Pandora. And I never saw him again over the next 16 years. The carefully chosen home after transition (purchased from that inheritance) became untenable as a life spent buying all meals, none made, all clean clothes (dirty apparently tossed) and drinking a great deal consumed all his modest salary, leaving nothing for property taxes, as the rental income from his tenant disappeared too. The town was taking possession of the house the day the police found her body.
I know because I was the one left holding her life in my hands after death.
But God did not fail his children. His children, all of us, create the lives we live in. Those creations are ours, not His. And we are humans, whose central characteristic is that we know our failures and want to know God.
73 years ago, today, a baby was birthed. It’s perfection was just true. And our imperfections surrounded him, and us everyday. God does not fail us. We fail to be God. Somehow we think we, our children, the world, should be as Perfect as if we were the God who made us.
We are not.
ordinary time
summer
change done
justification ends
and the world
without graduation
becomes living
When God Betrays You
it ends
and should not
the song is silent
what was light
is now dark
God did not fail you
the world you made
did
Saved By Design 