(How About) A Greenhouse Walking Track Community Center

A Concept Statement.

(Greenhouse on the Biltmore Estate - Dale S. Rogers)

Imagine — not just "picture," since scent is central to this— a lush, leafy greenhouse under a large, arching glass ceiling, filled with beautiful, breathing plants, most of which are also food.  It's warm, with an invigorating light moisture in the air.

Then, winding its way through this living space, a walking track, a footpath under the bowers, interspersed with fountains and benches.  There's a space in one corner, say about 25 x 25 ft., where near sundown the shelves of plants usually growing there can be swung into wheeled stacks and moved to open it up for meetings, small performances, etc.

The small café, its tables tucked in under the leaves, is always open starting later in the day, once all the work on the plants is through.  The music is selected for the tastes of the plants, the food for the people's.

You began coming here (remember, we're still imagining,) because you heard the walking path was very pleasant, and maybe to look at the various foods grown there and for sale.  But definitely hearing that interesting and generally healthier types of people were getting together there was an influence.

Once you'd been in there a couple times, you noticed how much you looked forward to that first in-breath of oxygen-rich air when you walked in the double door, and your step always became just a bit livelier.

Eventually you became a member, because you fell in love with all of it.  Membership in the co-op means that you get the best price and first crack at every new crop, with a year-round food share of whatever best grows in each season and cycle, and preferential choices for walking times and meeting space use.

You even looked forward to the open member meetings because you liked a lot of the people, and came to feel a common cause with them.
___

Now, realistically, we all know that good and even helpful ideas can and do run aground as easily as bad ones.  So any idea worth its salt has to stand up to a few good rounds of How's It Work, What-If and Then-What?

The key idea is that the combination of a strong, (literally) healthy Membership program, and the café (which could expand into a restaurant if the demand is there), could ease the enterprise out of the brutal stream of making it work exclusively as a retail operation on what's grown for sale.

Okay, sounds ducky; but "What If" it doesn't work?

If it didn't fly as this multipurpose dreamhouse, it could still be easily turned into simply a commercial greenhouse — unless the winter fitness or restaurant crowds are what draw the main support, who knows? — and I'll just need to find somewhere else to walk in the winter, even year-round.

Postscript
It would so cool if someone would do this; I'd consider moving there and becoming your first member, how's that?

(April 20, 2018)

(All the old posts restored, cleared of any unsuspecting copyright issues)

As noted in a post here some months back, I had promptly taken down all 150+ pieces that I'd put up over the years when I heard that a certain online image bank was sending hefty bills with threatening letters to bloggers who'd used one of their copyrighted images.

It didn't matter if you'd linked and attributed that photo (which I've always practiced), or immediately took it down.  You owed 'em, and they said they'd sue if you didn't pay.

Given what a wild and woolly frontier the Web was in the early years, with everyone reusing everything and proud of it, this certainly did seem like a dirty trick.

So I then started going through every post, following the links to everything that I'd put there, and zapped anything that I couldn't confirm had a Creative Commons license or was otherwise public domain.  This did get dreary, naturally, so it's taken awhile; it wasn't exactly a high priority, y'know?

But today, working on a new one, I finally got around to finishing going through the rest of the earlier posts, from way back in 2006.  So, for what it's worth, it's all there again, minus a couple of pix.


A quick search of "blogs images copyright threats" reveals quite an amount of cases; this one, among others, was detailed and instructive:
“If Getty Images sent you a demand letter, there is definitely potential for a lawsuit.” –  (Onehourprofessor.com)

"All Earth's water in a bubble"

Saying, "perhaps this will give us some perspective on how truly precious a resource water really is," Treehugger posted this provocative info-graphic from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), attempting to show how much water is there on, in, and above the Earth as a series of full bubbles.

The big one represents all of the water on, in and around Earth as a bubble 860 miles in diameter.  But that's 96% saltwater.  "The smaller sphere over Kentucky represents Earth's liquid fresh water in groundwater, swamp water, rivers, and lakes," the USGS says.  The volume of this sphere would be over 2.5 million cubic miles, forming a perfect bubble (and you have to imagine, quite an imposing one) about 170 miles in diameter.

That's the fresh water we need every day, but around 30% of it is unavailably deep in the ground. Rivers, the source of most of the fresh surface water people use, only constitute about 300 cubic miles, about 1/10,000th of one percent of total water.

"How much water is there on, in, and above the Earth?"  (USGS) 

From the USGS Water Science School, which offers "information on many aspects of water, along with pictures, data, maps, and an interactive center." 

"If you put all Earth's water In one place, it'd look like this"
by Jaymi Heimbuch, Treehugger.com

This Year's Spring View

The view across the street here in Catskill, NY, of the middle of the eastern range of the Catskill Mountains, three miles west.

            

"How do we come up with new ideas?"

Alison Arieff, blogging on design in the New York Times, asks this always-useful question, by way of giving some serious room to a gentleman who vividly "illustrates" the practical value of plain old seat of the pants blue-sky imagining.

She begins by listing a battery of common distractions we're all fighting through to remain optimistic enough to keep creative and productive, remarking,

"I can’t help thinking that we’re all so mired in it that we’ve forgotten how to get out of it — how to daydream, invent, engage with the absurd.

"That’s why I am so enamored with the work of inventor/author/cartoonist/former urban planner Steven M. Johnson, a sort of R. Crumb meets R. Buckminster Fuller. Many of his musings are simply whimsical, existing primarily as a source of inspiration or delight. Others tackle very real issues, from environmentalism to alternative transportation to homelessness."

(Johnson's caption:)
"Auto Abandonment Zones are built to acccomodate growing numbers of drivers who lose the will to proceed further in bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic. Drivers may pull off, leave car keys with an Abandonment Officer, and board a nearby train, phone relatives, or calm themselves in 'parks.'" (Bolding mine.)

As one who has spent far-r-r too much time edging along in traffic, in the pre-mostly-virtual world when the only way to get paid was to show up somewhere every day and be there throughout regular work hours — thus condemning you to rush hour drives — I found that to be wickedly dry humor. Arieff continues,

"In Johnson’s oeuvre, nothing gets to exist if it doesn’t have at least two functions: the skylight uses solar energy to cook the dinner, for instance, and the exercise bike operates the washing machine (cleaning clothes and toning the wearer’s muscles simultaneously)."

"Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas" (On Design blog), 5/4/09

For more examples of witty yet functional doubling-up, Johnson has visually proposed an array of gardening tool footwear, including the Weeding Oxfords, Shear Shoes, Lawn Aeraters, Lawn Edging Spurs, and the Watering Sneakers. Presumably, you could accomplish a lot of tasks among the dirt and weeds just by walking around — in a very deliberate manner, one would guess. Afterwards, you can relax in Johnson's Ten-Speed Hammock, or the Blooming Rose Chair with Ottoman (p. 62 in the book preview).

Now, a lot of this stuff is intentionally (we hope) zany; besides demonstrating some fairly precise drafting skills, the man's also a comedian. But the creative thinking on display, focused on real-world objects, can only spark a few fresh thoughts in anyone trying to see where things can progress in their own sphere of influence.

A vast number of such thoughts are drawn out in Johnson’s 1984 book: “What the World Needs Now: A Resource Book for Daydreamers, Frustrated Inventors, Cranks, Efficiency Experts, Utopians, Gadgeteers, Tinkerers, and Just About Everybody Else.” Let me recommend the final, how-to chapter, "Author's Tips for Inventing Useful and Useless Things," which is excerpted there at the other end of that link.

"I sit on the living room rug at home and look out the window at the garden. …I avoid my desk and drafting table, as such furniture has the connotations of serious endeavor, deadlines," etc.

He places a stack of typing paper and a pen or pencil on the floor next to him.

"I find that a few key words and a blurry scribble are all that I need for capturing an idea, but it is important to note down all ideas, since like dream images these products of the imagination evaporate easily and are usually impossible to retrieve."

===
Related, here:
Building 'Living Space' Around Railroad Stations

Where Do Great Ideas Come From?

Posts tagged innovation and creative thinking

You Can Only See It If You Stand Right Here

Here's a visual/conceptual treat, a little eye and brain candy, containing the ever useful reminder that sometimes your perspective is all about where you're standing.

Axel Peemoeller's avant-garage

Within a certain range, a small slice of the pie, the words are easily read. Presumably, that's at the physical point where you need it, because good design is primarily about usefulness, carefully refined functionality.

From anywhere outside the sweet spot, it's decorative; it's "Ahhht." But since a particular message isn't needed from that location, or even could be confusing and darnright counter-productive, there's no reason that space can't be used just for expression. In a case like this, any more interesting message than "parking garage" would be a welcome experiential improvement for the parkers, and the parkees.

Funny, it didn't occurr to me until now, a couple paragraphs into this, that maybe the reason I'm so drawn to a lively paint job for a parking garage is that I worked in one for a year or so, when still a very young feller. Fortunately my booth was on the street, just inside a very wide mouth of the building, so the air wasn't that awfully bad, either.

So, by all means, buy some paint! (And get those emissions checked, please.)

Here's Axel Peemoeller's home page, which I am disappointed to report is an all visual, unnavigable "artistic" mess -- no text clues on where to click for what. We're invited to "drag and drop and click on items," but mousing over the goobley graphics only offers invitations to "double click." So besides that the garage is in "Melbourne," I can't tell you anything else about him or the project, because I gave up trying to find out more. A fine model of usefulness, indeed.

So how did I come across this? The pictures above and below originally came to me via the traditional email full of non-attributed photos, which I found in this case to be sparky stuff. So I sleuthed it down, using the mighty Internet, and found the originator, in observance of our personal motto (and tag) here, "Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due."

Just Plain Beautiful

"Raine Island Reef, Australia"

Just some relief for your weary eyes and mind, a peaceful image by photographer Paul Sutherland, from the National Geographic (where they're celebrating the 120th Anniversary of the National Geographic Society). 

This is from their "Underwater Landscapes" photo gallery, free-downloadable for wallpaper.

A Shift in Perspective

(A Saturday afternoon post...)

"Everything is familiar, Daniel M. Tani said, but 'it feels a little alien.' He did not have some of the problems adjusting to gravity that other astronauts have had — absent-mindedly leaving an object in mid-air and being startled to see it crash to the ground. 'You’re very conscious of that,' he said.

"But he still marveled at the mundane. 'You take the lid off the bottle, and you put it on the table,' he said, 'and it’s just amazing that it stays on the sink.' In space, it would have flown away unless it was secured. 'You don’t have to find a piece of velcro to stick it to,' he recalled. 'that seemed like it was magic to me.'"

"Adapting to Earth After 120 Days in Space"
By John Schwartz, NY Times "The Lede" blog, 3/11/08

(Photo uploaded to Flickr by kEnObAnDo)

"View from a Creative Mind"

(Brief of a post of mine in The Heart Of Innovation, 1/3/08, starting with news of,)

"... a nearby exhibition, titled 'Illuminations,' of the work of Saul Steinberg, the artist most famously known for his frequent appearances over six decades in The New Yorker magazine. He was the clever fellow who gave us the much-imitated 1976 cover illustration of how New Yorkers see the world, 'The View from 9th Avenue,' where a couple of blocks of the city dominate, and the rest of the country occupies a small square of land in the distance.

"So much of his work displayed such a fresh, wonderfully creative mind that, for me, it 'illustrates' an essential attitude that successful innovators have. This is the habit of looking to see things newly, as opposed to how we usually see, which is through a haze of existing thought patterns; and, freely associating, to find useful connections between things that were hidden until then.

"In the words of the Saul Steinberg Foundation's page on his life and work, 'fingerprints become mug shots or landscapes; graph or ledger paper doubles as the facade of an office building; words, numbers, and punctuation marks come to life as messengers of doubt, fear, or exuberance.. ."

"Saul Steinberg: Illuminations" on view through February 24 '08 at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie NY. (845) 437-5632.

(First spotted in Chronogram magazine, by Beth Wilson, 12/07.)

(Image courtesy of the Saul Steinberg Foundation's Gallery)

Predators In The Televised Bushes (Tracing Back To Root Causes)

We tend to think of ourselves as "highly evolved," but while our mental world and all the technology we cook up with it has certainly evolved very speedily over the last, say, 100 to 150 years, our body and the back of our brain is still far behind. I think this fact goes a long way towards explaining how confused we are as a species, mostly clumsily crashing our way through life on this planet...

One day, watching some poor band of musicians trying in vain to compete with a couple of television screens just off to the side, I was once again troubled by the fact that I seemed unable to ignore the (stoopit) TVs. My gaze repeatedly switched to the screens, and away from the performance of the real, living, breathing bioforms that I was trying to watch.

Finally, it occurred to me that the reason we are virtually unable to ignore a flickering television, our eyes drawn to it unwillingly again and again, is due to the part of our brain, still very much active, that is always on the alert for any activity in our peripheral vision -- because it might be a wild animal in the brush, measuring us up for a snack.

So I was mightily interested when I came across the same thought applied to a different sense, in, ironically, a blog on a subject that almost could not be more contemporary or "highly evolved," that of digital musicmaking.

The post in Create Digital Music is titled, "Windows Sound Glitches Explained, Plus Glitches and the Fight-or-Flight Response" (11/2/07, by Peter Kirn).

"Your ears and mind are incredibly sensitive to tiny details of sound. Result: if your operating system can’t keep up with sound output for any reason, you’ll get a noticeable “glitch” in the sound — and that’s a big deal. "Microsoft has a great post on their Vista Team Blog today from Steve Ball --

'My colleague on the Windows Sound team, Larry Osterman, also pointed out to me recently that humans are actually “hard-wired” to be disturbed by audio glitches. In an exchange about this topic, Larry observed that audio glitches are more obvious than video glitches because the ear’s tuned to notice high frequency transients — his visceral example of this idea is an image of a stick snapping in the woods behind you as an audio event that wakes you up before a bear wanders into your path.'"

So, it's not that we are so dreadfully unfocused and ADD -- although we most certainly are -- it's more because the base of our brain is still executing a seldom-needed Primary Directive. Unless you live in a big, dirty city, in which case it's just doin' its equally contemporary job.

(Photo on Flickr by Edgar Thissen)

Two short bits of interesting thinking, one for each side

...of your brain.

First, one for the Listen For It side:

The other day I got back in contact with an old friend (and former employer, in fact), someone I knew as a near-total gearhead, but who these days is blogging quite amusingly at the eponymous Brent Noorda's Blog (with it's concise tagline of, "Anything sufficiently vague shall always ring true"). We were talking about favorite music in our exchange of mail, and he related this:

"We were in Africa (mostly Burkina Faso) last year, and ran across a guy who was a Yes fan and had lived quite a while in remote regions, where he played much of his music collection. He said that their 'Tales from Topographic Oceans' was the favorite music of the locals, who would say something like,"

"Play that one with the sounds that go all over the place for a long time."

Its famous cover art by Roger Dean

===
Then, one for the Make It Happen side:

A widely quoted statement attributed to Charles Roberts Buxton (1823-1871), an English brewer, philanthropist, writer and Member of Parliament.

"You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it."

(Like, for example, becoming a member of Parliament, creating classic albums with exquisite cover art and lengthy sounds that go all over, or putting together totally unrelated pairs of blog posts.)

Gehry, Bricklin, Prototyping; & "Repurposing Content"

The idea of recycling material, if you think about it, is as old as the human habit of telling stories. So I'm hoping that's a good enough explanation for why I'm basically republishing this post I wrote recently for the Heart of Innovation. : - )

That's the new blog I've been managing and writing in for Idea Champions, and frankly my attention has been primarily there lately, which is how it should be. So I'll be cross-posting bits that seem appropriate here, after giving them a week or some decent interlude from their original publication.

Frank Gehry's Designing By Prototype

Columnist Dale Dauten wrote recently about some of the insights on creative thinking gained from observing the revolutionary architect in "The Sketches of Frank Gehry," Director Sydney Pollack's first documentary, new on DVD. "We get to learn how a genius works," he writes.

"Frank Gehry is the architect who did the curving, soaring metal walls of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, as well as Disney Hall in Los Angeles. He is the one who lets us walk into 'out of the box.'

"During his early Gehry spent his time hanging out with artists rather than fellow architects.

"He works by taking sheets of heavy paper and making models out of them. Not blocks, not wood or Styrofoam, but paper. When one of the models becomes an idea worth pursuing, it goes through an evolution, a series of models of increasing sophistication."

Dauten, taking the dare, as it were, starts creatively cross-referencing:

"If we wanted to apply his style to, say, working on a new sales presentation, we wouldn't use other sales presentations for ideas, we'd use novels or plays, movies, paintings . . . maybe even, I don't know, zoos, or airports. And not just one, but dozens. Some would become rough models, several going at once."

"Inside the brain of a genius lies lessons on generating & implementing ideas" by Dale Dauten, 5/6/07. (Gehry's "Dancing Building" in Prague. Uploaded on Flickr by astilly.)

Rapid Prototyping, Dan Bricklin, & "Serious Play"

This reminded me of another recent read on the power of creating with the method of "rapid prototyping," from Dan Bricklin's blog. Bricklin is of course the co-inventor of the electronic spreadsheet, VisiCalc (the original Excel, and the first "killer app" on what were then "personal computers"), among other programming breakthroughs in simplification.

(Continued...)

Great Signs, and one wonders...

Found while searching for something else -- some irresistably funny signage:

(The bottom line reads, "Also, the bridge is out ahead." Oh; thanks.)

Another clever one:

Kudos to North Vancouver.

This is from an inscrutable weblog named, "City Comforts, temporarily known as Viaduct, the blog." Huh? It then contains the mysterious description, "What was this Blog About?", which they claim was, "Cities, architecture, the 'new urbanism,' real estate, historic preservation, urban design..." So naturally, the current item at the moment is on the new Apple iPhone (but I'm linking here to Macworld's take).

It appears they have a big debate going on in Seattle about fixing the Viaduct, asking the timeless question, "Could Seattle do without its elevated highway?" Funny to read from a Boston perspective, where they went in the opposite direction and Dug Big, for the greatest public work project/boondoggle in history. With that in mind, we applaud Seattle's elevated thinking.

Happy New Year, Month, Day...

In what I promise is the last of these meandering, relatively off-topic holiday posts:

I'm in NYC for a bit, so I decided to go, for the first time, to Times Square for the New Year's madness. You know, it's one of those either you've-got-to-do-it-once or once-is-enough things; I thought I'd go and see which one it turned out to be. That would be the latter; although it was fun and I am glad I went. Once.

Almost chickened out when I read in the days before that the city expected one million people -- 1,000,000 people! -- to be there, and that the police would be herding them into "pens" to keep things under control. So I decided to just go into the area for awhile earlier, then leave, just so I could catch the flavor and energy of it all. Of course, once I got there, obviously the only proper thing to do was stay for the climax.

There had to be vids of it on YouTube, because there were so many people holding their camcorders over their heads taping it, and sure enough, a search on YT for "Times Square New Years 2007" produces an ample supply.

I picked this video because that's as close as I got: at 57th Street on 7th Avenue, 15 blocks away. We could see The Ball, though it's hard to spot here; it descended into the spot where the fireworks come from. The papers suggested that you get there by 5 pm to get a penned-in spot in Times Square, where you would then not be allowed to leave for food or any other calls of nature. Uh, no thank you; I was going for a good time.


...and you are there! Sort of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jg-5S1U7tU