AltBuild Expo

6th Annual - Friday & Saturday May 8 & 9, 2009 - 10:00 am - 5:00 pm - free admission

Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. For more info click here.

Shodo Iwagaki exhibition - woodblock prints

05.15.2009 (Fri.) - 06.07.2009 (Sun.) at Tortoise in Venice

Shodo Iwagaki, a Soto-Zen Buddhist monk and an artist living in Japan will be at Tortoise. For this exhibition he will show 11 woodblock prints mounted on vintage indigo fabric in Kakejiku (scroll picture) style.

opening reception : 
Friday 5/15 6pm - 9pm @ tortoise 
*Live painting is scheduled. To read more click here.

Earth Day :: 39 years in the making

Advocated, promoted, and conceptualized by Senator Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day was becoming a huge grass roots sensation across the US after the Senator’s seven year effort and first meeting with President Kennedy. Less than a year later on April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated. Now 39 years later, after internet has become a necessity in our existence and you can google (a new “verb” that we know didn’t exist back in ‘69) to no end about Earth Day, new recycling techniques are part of our daily lives, and now, “green” has actually hit its colloquialism stride, Earth Day is a celebrated and anticipated holiday every year across the nation.

With all the talk of celebrating Earth Day, it can seem a bit daunting about how to “celebrate” or take part in the big day. So here are 5 activities (in no particular order) to feel like you're taking part or at least recognizing what your Earth means to you:

1) If the weather isn’t very inviting for an outdoor activity, take some time (in your loft or own respective abode) and indulge in the BBC series, Planet Earth. David Attenborough offers great British narration, and after just a couple episodes in the eleven episode series, you’ll be rethinking some aspect of waste and pollution you produce in the world. (Hint: Watch it without the lights on, since you’re already using electricity to actually view the series). It took four years to produce and is the most expensive BBC series to date that has ever been made. And if you’re an animal freak, nature geek, or just want to kick it back on Earth Day, then rent or even buy (it’s worth the investment for sure) the DVD set. It won’t disappoint.

2) It’s the quickest thing you can do: Make the No Coal Call. All you need is this number: 202.224.3121. This will get you in contact with your member in Congress and to demand from them a moratorium on coal-fired power plants.

3) Calculate your ecological footprint, and then more importantly, figure out the changes you can make to decrease this number.  Go here to start calculating: Find Out Your Footprint NOW

4) If you’re more into giving away the real “green” then you can find more than plenty charitable causes that will take your green bucks off your hands.  Adopt An Acre, Rescue the Reef, or apply for a Nature Conservancy Visa credit card so when you make your first purchase, 10 trees will be planted in the Atlantic Forest and an additional tree will be planted each month afterward.

5) Something so small, can be huge in the end. Such as changing out your lightbulbs, switching to totes (there’s still too much plastic being wasted these days), and honestly not turning on your AC as strong or so soon, even if we’re slowly making our way from Spring to Summer. Think ’bout it.

HAPPY EARTH DAY!

Do you know what you're going to do for Earth Day?

Visit EartDay.net and find an event near you.

Go see Earth!

Join the Arbor Day Foundation and get 10 free trees.

Plant a baby tree at mybabytree.org

Start a compost bin.

Get a rain barrel. 

Plant a garden.

For more ideas go to JustDoOne

TELL YOUR BOSS YOU FEEL SICK AND GO OUTSIDE AND ENJOY THE WEATHER!

(Hey it's Earth Day - it should be a national holiday anyway!) 

are these for real?

! ! ! MUJI back online ! ! !

After a long absence from the internet, MUJI is back! As of April 16th, MUJI devotees in the US can shop online (currently, Muji only operates two retail stores in New York). The selection is limited, but we’re hoping the catalog will expand. You can download their catalogs here.

Architecture in Baja

D’Acosta and Turrent joined a 1940s American mobile home with a Mexican office trailer to make a comfortable, inexpensive dwelling that seems to float on the land. Recycled aluminum doors and windows came from second-hand shops in Ensenada. An open-air aluminum-and-wood pavilion they reclaimed from an old factory is covered with carizzo, a cane grass, taken from their neighbor’s trash. Recycled telephone poles support the structure; recycled beams from an old bridge make up the deck. “All vernacular architecture depends on what you have at hand," D'Acosta says. "We need to train our eyes to convert things near us into usable objects.”

LA Times :: arcticle by Barbara Thornburg with photography by Don Bartletti

Mexican winery

Paralelo winery in Baja's Valle de Guadalupe is architect Alejandro D’Acosta’s latest wine project.

Alejandro D'Acosta and Claudia Turrent have quietly been spreading their brand of sustainable design in northern Baja, Mexico, turning trash into interesting architecture. One of D'Acosta's recent experiments is La Escuelita, a wine school and olive oil factory in the Guadalupe Valley. One building is made of palos — discarded wood boards taken from construction sites, while the new wine tasting center’s walls are composed of wine barrel staves.

A vineyard in the Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico’s premier wine-growing region in Baja, near Ensenada.

D’Acosta stands next to wine barrels and rammed-earth walls imprinted with nopal cactus. “At one point the cactus actually started growing in the walls,” he says.

D’Acosta sits atop a wine barrel in the underground wine cave of his latest winery, Paralelo. The architect imprinted rammed-earth walls with things he found on the property: olive branches, nopal cactus and old tires. “This building is in touch with Pacha Mama — Mother Nature,” D’Acosta says.

To see more wonderful photos by Don Bartletti (coincidentally a former student of my father's) in the LA Times click here & here.

succulents down south

LA Times :: over the weekend was a succulent garden tour of five gardens from Carlsbad to Olivenhain sponsored by the American Assn. of University Women . Unfortunately the LA Times is such a crappy paper it didn't report the tour until Sat. I would have enjoyed going. Maybe next year. See more photos here.

wrinkles are beautiful

I just had to post this ::

Tokyo (Reuters Life!) - Wear a shower cap over your face. Think about sexy men. And don't stress about those wrinkles.

All are part of Japanse beauty expert Chizu Saeki's "Skincare Revolution", her compilation of sometimes unorthodox facial care that has made her a household name in Japan.

"As you age, it's okay to have wrinkles, it's okay to have age spots, it's okay to sag," the 66-year-old Saeki told Reuters after the publication of "The Japanese Skincare Revolution", her first book to come out in English. "Becoming beautiful isn't cosmetics, it's your way of thinking, your hands," she said.

Gotta love that!

tiny house

I recently purchased Tiny Houses by Mimi Zeiger hoping to get some inspiration for an out-building that we could put up in the future (way out in the future) that would be small enough to NOT require a permit. To my surprise, included was a project I came across several years ago by Stuttgart architects FNP Architekten. 

It is the renovation of a pigsty for a showroom and it's name S(ch)austall depicts the humorous relationship between these two uses: saustall = pigsty; schaustall = showroom.
To deal with the crumbling 18th century structure, the architects created a "house within a house", a wood container that fit within the old stone walls but without touching them.

Links:

2005 AR Award for Emerging Architecture 

FNP Architekten

A Daily Dose of Architecture

hope

"There is Hope Here" by Zach Bulick available at Wall Blank.

Pritzker Prize Goes to Peter Zumthor

NY Times :: Swiss architect Peter Zumthor is the 2009 recipient of the Pritzker Prize, the highest recognition for architects.

this should happen more often

I've seen the "Sound of Music" enough to last a lifetime, frankly. But I saw this on You Tube and it just makes me smile . . . frankly.

Sweet, simple pleasures. Good times.

history of the color wheel

The first color wheel has been attributed to Sir Isaac Newton, who in 1706 arranged red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet into a natural progression on a rotating disk. As the disk spins, the colors blur together so rapidly that the human eye sees white.
From there the organization of color has taken many forms, from tables to charts, to triangles and wheels.
Read more here.

top ethical companies

New York, April 13 (Reuters) - The Ethisphere Institute on Mon named 99 companies it says are the world's most ethical, it's third annual listing designed to encourage ethical practices within the global business community. Included were Honeywell International, Patagonia, Nike, BMW, Johnson Controls Inc, and HSBC Holdings. 35 countries were represented. Read the entire list here.

new soap, old bottle

This company sells brand name soaps repackaged in old plastic bottles. The only negative is that they use antibacterial soaps. I guess no one has clued them in about how bad that is, causing hormonal issues with water life.  Oh well.  Click here for more info & to shop online.  

Update 4.19.09 :: Among the most worrisome of the new contaminants are "endocrine disruptors," chemical compounds found in common household products that mimic hormones in the human body and cause freakish mutations in frogs and amphibians.

Happy Easter!

LIFE IN TOPANGA

Our neighbor Ted brought these over yesterday. They are fertile, organically raised eggs from his chickens. They are so beautiful. We're going to have to make something really special with them.

LIFE

Hope is the Thing with Feathers

by Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm

I've heard in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

This poem is part of a much larger poem called, Life.

the Incredibles mid-century ideal

The home of Bob & Helen Parr in "The Incredibles" is one of the finest examples of mid-century modernism in all animated cinema.

- read more at "the mid-century modernist"

Le Corbusier at the Barbicon - London

NY Times :: an exhibition devoted to the work of the modernist architect Le Coerbusier has drawn crowds to the gallery at the Barbicon Center in London, itself a large part of a larger development designed in a Brutalist vein that Le Corbusier inspired. Slide show here.

fantasies of Frank Lloyd Wright

Ever dreamed about living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house? Well, this one's for sale near Los Banos, California, midway between Monterey and Yosemite. Interested parties (or architecture voyeurs) can tour Wright's Fawcett Ranch House (completed in 1961) at an open house this Sunday, April 5th. The catch? This gorgeous retreat will cost you a cool $2.7 million.

something to do - a reminder

more info at venicegardentour.org

i'm so lucky

Yesterday was my birthday and since we had been gone all weekend, John never had time to plan anything. But he surprised me with a candle in a brownie! What a guy!

Oh - and Louise called me 3 times!