Shiny, shiny new

New:


















Old:

Read about the amazing, 90% energy self-sufficient new Monte Rosa hiker's hut at Inhabitat. The hut is one run by the Swiss Alpine Club which has accommodations of varying degrees of rusticity all along the country's extensive network of hiking trails.

Here's a website (in German or French only) devoted to the the project. The project was overseen by Andrea Deplazes, in his capacity of professor of architecture at Zürich's ETH (Institute of Technology), and partner of one of my fave architecture firms, Bearth + Deplazes.

Where are my hiking boots?! – GF

Nathan Gluck, Modern Artist

Clicking through the modern design blogs, with their focus on houses and furniture and artifacts, it's easy to forget that there were people who lived and worked -- created -- entirely in the modern realm. One was our friend Nathan Gluck, who died in late September (Gina wrote about him here).

I met Nathan in the mid 1980s and knew him entirely in the context of the Federico family, with whom he was friends since the late 1930s. He worked at a place I had never heard of -- AIGA -- and created things that, to my narrow non-art-world eyes, were astonishing: paintings of quasi-mythological figures, 8 1/2-by-11 crayon drawings, postcards, photograms. He created his own greeting cards! I didn't realize people could or would do that. (He wasn't the only one doing it of course -- my future father-in-law in collaboration with my future mother-in-law produced his own, as did my future wife, my future sister-in-law, and a whole slew of their graphic artist friends.)

Almost everything we've seen of Nathan's was done on a small scale. They are colorful and deft and effortless, as if he knocked them out in the evening after finishing other tasks. He was immensely prolific and generous with his work -- it sometimes seemed that no sooner did he finish a drawing than he put it in the mail and sent it off. There's a drawing he sent to Gina's parents in 1950 of a girl carrying a bunch of balloons. "For Junior," it says and he must have mailed it just before Gina's sister, Lisa, was born and named. There's another -- a simple crayon drawing -- that he sent to us in 1993: "Snowy Owl for Elie," it says in his handwriting, our daughter Elie having been born that year.






Nathan created a lot a collages in his later years and showed dozens of them in a gallery on the Upper East Side in 1997. (We went to the opening one Saturday in late winter, as I remember it, and later visited Leo Lionni, the graphic artist and children's book author, in his apartment -- I remember seeing the cut-outs of the mice characters that he used to illustrate his books, like Frederic, piled in a tray on his desk.) The collages attracted attention and admiration. Here for example is what Nathan's good friend Luis de Jesus wrote:

It's hard for me to separate Nathan, the person, from Nathan the artist. The two were inextricably bound. Anyone who knew him personally can see his quirky, yet elegant sense of style, sharp wit, appreciation of language, music and the classics, and, above all, his oddball sense of humor reflected throughout his work. This is most apparent in the collages that he created beginning in 1995, during his 'retirement' period. It is in these works that Nathan finally found his unique voice, as if everything that he had ever collected over the years--all of the thoughts and ideas, competing influences and styles, tidbits of trivia and non-sense, recipes and scraps of ephemera--could no longer be contained and compartmentalized and simply exploded in a remarkable output of creativity. He leveled the playing field and everything became equal. It says so much about him as a person and an artist--honest, warm, unpretentious and a true original.

While I might disagree that Nathan "finally found his unique voice" in the collages, I absolutely agree that from what I knew of Nathan the collages are an expression of himself. We just happen to like his earlier work a bit better, perhaps because it seemed as if he were creating them for us -- which, in fact, he did. Steven Heller just published a good account of Nathan's life and career for AIGA (which I now know stands for American Institute of Graphic Artists), here. Note the description of Nathan's apartment, filled with art and artifacts. I visited him there twice and it had to be seen to be believed. His most valuable drawings were on the crowded wall but were draped with pages torn from magazines to protect them from the light. He showed me where he had an Andy Warhol piece -- U.S. currency -- that he had sold or given to a museum in exchange for a good copy that he hung on the wall instead. There was a phrenologic head from the 19th century that his father had given him, and which he gave to Gina last February when she and Lisa went to help him pack up for his move to San Diego.

Last week two institutions dedicated to Warhol's work took a death notice in the Times. (If you look at what's been written about Nathan recently, you see hints that he might have had more to do with Warhol's early art than is generally believed). Here's what it says:

GLUCK -- Nathan, gifted graphic artist and collagist, and Andy Warhol's commercial art assistant, died in San Diego on September 27, 2008 at the age of 90. Nathan's wit and unfailing generosity of spirit will be greatly missed by his friends and colleagues at The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York and The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

We almost always have one or two of Nathan's pieces on display in our house. Last week and this week the house is a Nathan Gluck gallery featuring our favorite works by an artist whose career spanned almost the entire modern era.

(Nathan's pictures, from top: A crayon drawing he did for our daughter soon after she was born; a greeting card, "Noel," from 1939 -- the image on the left is the front, the image on the right is the inside; a collage he created for our daughter; a painting, one of three similar paintings he did for Gene Federico in 1947.) -- ta

Letters from Sweden - the foundation

One issue we have not examined as we looked at the fabrication of houses in the factory is the foundation work that goes on in advance of the arrival of the house. The Swedes are using some innovative products for foundations as well, products that make there status quo houses much more energy efficient than ours here in the States.

New houses in Sweden are primarily built on slabs, partly because its expedient, but also because its naturally the best way to have in floor radiant heating. In a cold climate this is the only way to use a slab otherwise your slab will feel cold and uncomfortable. But a slab in a cold climate must be insulated from the elements or it will throw heat out its edges. There are typically two strategies to isolate your slab from the cold.

The first strategy is to make an insulation break between the slab and the foundation wall. This is typically done with a narrow insulation layer. In order to place this between the slab and wall the two structures have to be built in separate operations. First the wall, insulation break, and then the slab is poured inside the walls. Two steps.

The second strategy is to insulate the outside edge of the slab. This allows you to pour the slab and foundation wall in a single step, but you have to return and install insulation around the perimeter. Thats not the end of it though. This insulation is of course very vulnerable to damage. Its a soft material and it is right at grade, so it must be protected by something tough, usually the best choice is a cement board product. The insulation and protection board creates at best a second step.

Ok, what are the Swedes doing. First of all they are not building deep foundations. All buildings in cold climates should be founded on soils below the frost line. How do the Swedes avoid this then. I''ve not seen photos of their entire site prep sequence but they appear to be setting slabs on stone beds which may reach below frost, and prevent soil expansion if frozen. Furthermore they are building on slabs insulated at the perimeter which allows the radiant slab heating system to warm the earth below the center of the slab which prevents soils below the foundation from freezing and heaving. So suddenly they have eliminated the foundation wall and only need to build the slab on grade. A great savings in time, effort, and expense. Ok, but they still end up with the slab insulation issues described above. No. They use a foam formwork that forms the perimeter of the slab, and insulates it at the same time. And this foam formwork is coated with a tough cement finish coating that protects the foam and prevents it from being damaged. Even more important, its one step.

Laying out the slab - corner pieces are place first.

Ready for the pour, edge forms, wire mesh, plumbing, and heating loops all in place.

The slab poured. Once cured its ready to receive the prefab house.

Here is an example of a Swedish manufacturer of these foam forms:

Jakon Isolering

Previously:

Letters from Sweden - deliver and set

Letters from Sweden - plumbing the prefab

Letters from Sweden - wiring zen

Letters from Sweden - a windows tale

Letters from Sweden - panel building in Sweden vs the USA

Letters from Sweden - Europe is different, Sweden is not, sort of..

Letters from Sweden - land of modern, land of prefab

Letters from Sweden - conversations with an expatriate builder

Technorati Tags: modern design, modern house, prefab house

Contrast

Photo from the current exhibition, ‘Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture’ at The Crypt, Metropolitan Cathedral Liverpool.

It's the Pavillon Suisse, a student dormitory in Paris which was intended to resemble a ship on a sea of green landscape. Look at the contrast between the automobile and the building. This is 1930-32. – GF

A coherent account of the Financial Crisis

Another excellent program on This American Life today all about the financial crisis. If you remember back in May I recommended their program called The Giant Pool of Money which explained in easy to understand terms how the sub-prime lending debacle happened. Similarly today's program titled Another Frightening Show About the Economy explains in easy to understand terms how this all happened.

The financial players on Wall Street had essentially placed "bets" in the form of complex financial constructs called Credit Default Swaps. These were placed by the banks against one another making them all interdependent and likely to topple if one fell. These were first conceived as a form of insurance, later used as more or less a bet. There is no regulation of these financial devices, and hence no overall picture of how over leveraged the industry was. Incredibly irresponsible.

I highly recommend getting the podcast from their site if you have any interest at all in understanding what just happened to you and me - it is a free download for the first week following the show. Here is a link to their site:

http://www.thislife.org/

Or if you are an iTunes user you can subscribe and get the show from there.

couldn't resist . . .

Can't add anything to this. . . Very clever, LifeGoods! via swissmiss –GF

neat little boxes

David Jameson Architects in Alexandria, VA, designed these cute little boxes – uh, houses – as a family retreat on Hoopers Island.
“. . . the house is composed of several separate cabins that can be locked down or conditioned and inhabited as needed. Although the cabins are individual buildings, they are linked conceptually by their exterior metal cladding and the fact that all of the roofs are sloped but coplanar. A screened porch connects the three main cabins while providing a breezy place to relax. A wood deck extends from the main lodge towards the river, which creates access to the above-ground swimming pool and a platform for sunbathing.” – GF