GTI

Finally here, trip home from the dealer took almost as long as it sat at the port. All is well and we won't be driving around the city at 6pm anytime soon. We will report back once we have combed over the car and stretched it's legs a bit.

Carbon Steel Grey with Plaid seats...

The Hot Hatch Cometh

Well, in approximately 2 months it'll cometh. I'll let the *boy fill in the details but here are the pictures of our 4-Door, Carbon Gray Steel, VW GTI DSG w/ Tiptronic Transmission (that's fancy talk for automatic).












It has tartan plaid seats and red accent stitching on the wheel — my favorite part.

Not so Shiny Anymore

Now that it's caked in road grime and getting ready for its first spring cleaning, my custom bicycle (hand-built by my little brother) takes center stage here on the blog. Here's the story from welding to riding and a quick how-to for hanging a cycloc.

The color, a very popular subject, is not the actual Bianchi celeste green. It is a color I chose which is somewhere between celeste and Tiffany Blue but it is often mistaken for a Bianchi.

Failings of Modernism

And to think, the Modernist movement was touted and intended to raise the standard of living for everyone - albeit through the virtues of industry. In my education there was a certain nostalgia and notion that the general public just didn’t get Modernism because of its abstract qualities and essential forms. Though a little radical this begins to make a lot of sense as you walk through desolate Boston City Hall Plaza.

“The messes we’ve made of places where we live and work is not solely the result of bad buildings, though there are plenty of them. But that hardly lets architects off the hook. Rather, with the hubris of religious zealots, they set out on a great purifying mission that damaged the whole physical setting for civilization of our time. The dogmas that guided them went by the name of modernism. Heretics and skeptics were anathematized as systematically as the opponents of the fifteenth–century Vatican.
Modernism did its immense damage in these ways: by divorcing the practice of building from the history and traditional meaning of building; by promoting a species of urbanism that destroyed age-old social arrangements and, with them, urban life as a general proposition; and by creating a physical setting for man that failed to respect the limits of scale, growth, and the consumption of natural resources, or to respect the lives of other things. The result of Modernism, especially in America, is a crisis of the human habitat: cities ruined by corporate gigantism and abstract renewal schemes, public buildings and public spaces unworthy of human affection, vast sprawling suburbs that lack any sense of community, housing that the un-rich cannot afford to live in, a slavish obeisance to the needs of automobiles and their dependent industries at the expense of human needs, and a gathering ecological calamity that we have only begun to measure.”

The Geography of Nowhere
James Howard Kunstler

Synthetic Landscapes

Living in the city forces me to live within manufactured landscapes in my everyday life. I am forced to watch planet Earth DVDs to see the natural beauty and phenomena of nature. On rare occasions nature intervenes and wreaks havoc on the city in the form of a heavy white blanket. It merges the well distinguished zones of infrastructure and circulation into a continuous landscape that disregards all humans attempts to organize nature. We can't sweep it away fast enough to remember where we are suppose to walk and drive our cars and cross the street.

As an architect I feel I am constantly trying to blur the definition of the distinct zones because if we can merge the functions we won't need so much space and can reduce our footprint in every way. If we don't need as much space there is a chance we might be closer to "natural" nature. Unfortunately most people don't want to walk in the street or drive on the lawn let alone work in the same zip code they live in. We leave our homes to heat themselves while we go to an empty office that was kept warm all night so we will be comfortable when we get there. I live in the city that is so dense yet everything is separated and distinct. I can't help but think a farmer living and working on a farm is living a much more urban life by layering all of life's needs in one place.

We associate urban life with density and rural life with wide expanses but the opposite may be true. True urban and rural life are not all that different, within a few acres of land both can get everything they need, there are just more or less people around. It is suburban life that is striving to merge the two that is choking nature and pushing the rural and urban conditions further and further apart.

Our dependence on automated transportation as an everyday commonplace is forcing us to travel further and further perpetuating the problem. Industry and consumption blind common sense and skew human existence into a wasteful self perpetuating machine. We are constantly spreading ourselves further and further apart thus the quality of our life, relationships, and by default nature are all suffering. We use technology and consumption to attempt to mend these rifts only to move further away. It is only through the perseverance of nature that we get intermittent reminders of true beauty and the frailty of our existence and shortcomings to understand true human nature and what is necessary.

This post was meant to be a short introduction and photographs of the beautiful work of Tara Donovan but I distracted myself. Another day.

Goodbye Old Friend

What better way to say goodbye than a 45-mile ride through the countryside.

For the past year and a half, I have relied on my creaky old Peugeot bicycle to get me to and from work, traversing the perilous Boston traffic in both 0º winter mornings and 95º summer afternoons, alike. I resurrected the bike from a neglected life in a garage, stripped it to the frame and rebuilt it as a retro-inspired, fixed gear bike. "Fixed Gear" means that only one gear ratio is tied directly between the rear wheel and the crank. In short: if the wheel is turning, you are pedaling. It took about three months to devise a plan and locate the parts to convert this early 70’s French bicycle into a modern, urban commuter with all the bells and whistles.

It is no surprise, then, that I felt a bit of remorse this weekend as I stripped off the wheels, pedals and seat - leaving it helpless on the floor of my apartment - and took the bus to re-fit those parts onto a shiny new, custom-built track frame (more to come later). After serving me so well, I couldn't let it remain an amputee and have decided to replace the missing parts so that Peugeot can retire to a life of leisurely rides through the New Hampshire countryside. The new, nameless bicycle is now faced with the challenge of serving me as well as my old friend has for the last 18 months.

Interested in builing your own fixed gear? My only advice is to start here.