remembering

Memorial Day gives us a chance to pause and reflect, with gratitude, on the millions of ordinary people who have done extraordinary things when called upon to serve and defend their fellow citizens. There is an ethos of service and sacrifice that defines us in our best moments, and it is an ideal to which we ought to strive more and more.

And since we see the world through the lens of the built environment, our Memorial Day tribute is, of course, architectural. Of Maya Lin's sublime Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1980-82), the best description may be from John Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), where he wrote of architecture that, "We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her."

Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day, everyone!

our first harvest

With the turkey brined, and slowly air drying under a coat of spices in our refrigerator, it's an opportune time to reflect on the slow progress of our garden. We harvested our first tomato last week, and have been using some of the herbs we've been growing, including basil, garlic, sage, rosemary, savory and dill. We have some cucumbers ripening on the vine, which might find their way into a salad tomorrow night, and we have a bumper crop of sweet potato vine that might end up as a Thanksgiving side dish.

the difference between community and adjacency

We celebrated our first Halloween at tin box last week. The house’s construction makes it easy to decorate: the ferromagnetic shell allowed us to hang spiders using magnets, the thin edges of the steel purlins were the perfect place to clip the blinking jack-o-lantern lights, and the steel exterior panels let us hang spooky plastic stuff with simple masking tape. The electrical outlet on the porch is perfectly placed to power the blinking lights, whose orange glow harmonizes well with the silver skin of the house. There was just one problem. Nobody showed up.