"a nursery of opportunity"

This is the video of James Jiler's talk, "A Sentence of Transformation," at TEDxCoconutGrove last October. James talked about his experiences developing horticulture programs for prisoners at Rikers Island, and, since 2008, his work with Urban GreenWorks, which helps at-risk adults and minors through garden-building projects in South Florida.

James designed the beautiful food forest and native plant landscape around tin box, which produces food for us, creates habitat for native species, and conserves water and natural resources. Next on our reading list: his 2006 book, Doing Time in the Garden, about gardening in prisons.

thanks, Uncle Sam!

The week between Christmas and New Years is traditionally reserved for countdowns and best-of lists, so we’ve decided to compile our own. We’ll mark the 26 days until President Obama’s second inauguration with our highly subjective list of the 26 best federal government policies, laws and initiatives, at least since 1787.

This project is inspired by the frequently espoused Right-wing and/or libertarian position – as wrong as it is loud – that nothing good ever comes out of the federal government. Of course the irony of expressing that retrograde view over the (federally financed) Internet is lost on the government’s critics, but, whatever. For the next four weeks we’re going to celebrate that most beautiful gift of the Enlightenment, democracy.

Drum roll, please...!

art

One of the real pleasures of designing tin box was imagining it as a house filled with works of art, many of which have been made by close friends. We're slowly surrounding ourselves with works that inspire us and remind us of our incredible - if far-flung - community of artists and designers. The most prominent work of art in the house is an untitled piece by Barrie Cline, a friend of Holly's since grade school. Barrie designed the ceramic, wood and gesso work as a site-specific project for our dining area.

infrastructure and inspiration

I passed through Madrid to change planes on the way to Milan, and found it striking that a number of passengers stopped to take photographs of the airport. I don’t blame them – it’s a beautiful airport, after all – but it occurred to me that I had never seen travelers take photos of any of my “home” airports in Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, or Newark. Why not?

day job, back to Milan edition

On Tuesday, I will be back in Milan to give a presentation on my book, The Battle for Modernism. The symposium is organized by Silvia Bignami and Paolo Rusconi, who just worked with Antonello Negri and other collaborators on an enormous - and important - exhibition of Italian paintings from the 1930s at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. It is always real honor to be invited to speak about my work, but all the more so in this case, both because Milan was the center of architectural activity discussed in my book, and because I will share the dais with Paolo Nicoloso, a scholar whose work was hugely important for my dissertation research.

planning FIU

The Perkins + Will master plan for FIU’s Maidique Campus is good. There are some particularly good places in the plan where the architects have laid out new courtyard spaces that echo the scale of the campus’s more successful outdoor spaces. The new courtyards promise to help foster and sustain discourse by creating gathering places for the academic community. There are, however, some limitations to the plan:  

salad

Last week's harvest brought us a nice range of salad fixings. We had our first cucumber, a bunch of tomatoes, some baby lettuces (including romaine and red leaf), sorrel, and cranberry hibiscus. The last one is new for us - it's a tangy, citrusy leaf that brought a lot of flavor to the salad (and we're not the only ones who like it). The sorrel, too, made for a great contrast with the sweet tomatoes and the crunchy, though largely flavorless, cuke.

night

The courtyard (left) and the front of the house (below) at night. The transparency of the windows and doors (created by the lighting in the courtyard - including the hanging Foscarini Uto lamps - and in the interior) emphasizes the continuity of the roof structure between the inside and outside. Our next step is to furnish the courtyard, so we can take better advantage of the low humidity and moderate evening temperature of the dry season.

shop local

Yes, Small Business Saturday is a made-up holiday invented by a credit card company and promoted by a social media behemoth, but it's a good opportunity for us to praise the local businesses that helped us build tin box. Quality construction services are not a given in Miami - these businesses deserve credit for providing exceptional service. We recommend:

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.

view from the home office

Working at home, with breaks to plant more leafy greens and herbs in the garden, reveling in the beautiful "winter" weather.

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.

certified

On Thursday, we received our Florida Water Star and Florida Friendly Landscape certifications from our rater, Lorna Bravo. We earned Florida Water Star's highest certification, Gold, for our water conservation measures, and the Florida Friendly Landscaping certification recognizes our sustainable landscape practices. Lorna, a brilliant sustainable construction consultant and master gardener, guided us through the certification processes, and James Jiler, the landscape designer about whom we've written before, is responsible for creating a native wildlife-sustaining habitat and food forest that does not require irrigation.

awesomeness

Check out this beautiful house by Jacob and Melissa Brillhart.

photos

Our prefabricated steel construction system supplier, Ecosteel, has commissioned publicity photographs of tin box from Barry Grossman of Grossman Photography. Barry took some preliminary photos last week, and will return in the fall - once the landscape has started to fill out and we finish unpacking our boxes. Here are some images from last week.

staying dry

peafowl seem to like hiding from the rain on the porch

With classes cancelled at FIU and throughout South Florida today, it's a good time to talk about the house's performance during cyclones. Like every building in the region, tin box is designed to withstand very high winds and intense amounts of rain without sustaining any damage. The trailing side of Tropical Storm Isaac is passing through Miami now with an almost regular pattern of calm-storm-calm-storm, and it is giving us a chance to look at how the house fares. The results so far are good.

awaiting Isaac, remembering Andrew

Ron Magill, flamingoes at the Miami Metro Zoo.

The practice of naming cyclones is unsettling. Anthropomorphizing storms gives them agency and makes them seem malevolent; a tornado or earthquake is a random act of nature, "Katrina" was a malicious killer.

All over South Florida today people are marking the twentieth anniversary of the day Hurricane Andrew hit, and the consensus is that the destruction caused by the storm - and the region's lack of preparedness - "changed everything." The approach of Tropical Storm Isaac, which may make landfall as a hurricane in three days, makes the anniversary more urgent than nostalgic.

kitchen counter

Our cabinet maker just finished the surface of the kitchen countertops, which means this may be the cleanest you'll ever see the kitchen. The countertop is made from slabs of black Richlite, a composite material made from layers of paper bonded with epoxy. In it's fresh-from-the-factory state, the material has a papery texture on the surface, though it has a density and hardness more like stone. But after sanding it repeatedly with increasingly fine sanding pads, the surface feels more like soapstone or an epoxy laboratory countertop. The surface is then protected with a coat of natural wood finish that includes linseed oil, tung oil and lemon. The finish is rubbed in with a rag, and needs to be reapplied annually.

Now we just need to let it sit for twelve hours. Then we can start cooking.

Below, another gratuitous image of the gorgeous Plyboo pantries, and the ultra-functional LED task lighting...

coming home

I came home from Ethiopia late Tuesday night, and woke up at tin box yesterday morning. It was pretty special. Holly spent the summer completing the house, and all that's left is the punch list (the final items that need to be addressed by the contractor to complete the house) and unpacking boxes that have been in storage since before we moved to Miami. At left is a photograph of the kitchen at sunrise. Among the highlights of my first morning at home: making coffee on the electric induction cooktop (water boils unbelievably fast), drinking it in the courtyard, taking a long shower (of filtered rainwater heated by our solar hot water panel), and watching the new families of peafowl wandering through the garden.

I've lived in spaces designed by or with Holly on and off for the last 22 years, and this one is really, really special.

appetizers

We'll get back to posting on the progress of the house and reporting on how well the various systems are working next week. For now, a few tasty morsels of photos Holly took last week...

trees, streets and empires

Sudan Street, Addis Ababa

The history of Addis Ababa is intricately linked to its trees. The city was given its name, which means “New Flower,” by the Empress Taitu in what may have been a reference to the area’s plentiful mimosa trees. Yet within a few years of Emperor Menelik II making the city his permanent capital around 1887, the sovereign considered relocating because of the deforestation caused by felling trees for construction materials and firewood. The introduction of Australian eucalyptus trees in 1905, probably by two French diplomats, saved the city. Eucalyptus grows quickly in the Ethiopian highlands, and will grow a new trunk from the stump of a cut tree. It made an ideal resource for construction and firewood – a role it still serves – and has naturalized throughout much of the country. When the Italians made Addis Ababa the capital of their African empire in 1936, they brought a new set of trees with them.

day job, indoor edition

Archival materials can be incredibly helpful for the kind of research I’m doing on architecture and urbanism in East Africa. These resources can be correspondence and other written documents (logs, contracts, diaries, receipts, reports), photographs, drawings, maps, catalogs, brochures, and objects of all sorts. Often these materials are conserved in archives and libraries, but not always; on Thursday I am going to visit the offices of a construction company that has been based in Eritrea and Ethiopia since the 1930s, and which has a large collection of photographs documenting their work over the years. The material I’ve looked at so far in the Ethiopian National Archives and the Institute for Ethiopian Studies has been very revealing for two main reasons: it documents the processes of construction in great detail and it helps establish a clear chronology of the layers of development in East African metropolises. In both cases the archival evidence often contradicts later written accounts or fills in the vast gaps in our knowledge.

day job, outdoor edition

We haven't posted on tin box for a while now, but things are progressing at the house. We'll have updates on construction later in August.

One reason for the lack of updates is that I've been in Ethiopia since June, conducting research for two book projects about modern architecture and urbanism here. The first book will deal with the period of Italian colonization in East Africa (1935-41) and the second will look at the whole arc of modernization in Ethiopia since the reign of Menelik II. This research has been exciting, in part because I came here with far fewer expectations and assumptions than I had when I started the dissertation studies that led to my first book. The paucity of historical scholarship on modern architecture and urbanism in Africa means that I had to approach Ethiopia prepared to improvise. And Ethiopia rewards improvisation.

paving

Our paving crew spent much of Saturday installing the concrete pavers for our porches, courtyard, front walk and driveway. The pavers sit on a bed of compacted sand, which establishes the slope for the paving and provides a dense supporting medium to distribute the weight of whatever the pavers are carrying (people, cars, elephants)...

contrasts

With the construction fence removed today, the transparency of the living/dining room and its relationships to the park and courtyard have become more visible. Here's the covered patio facing the park, seen from the park with the sun setting behind. The rest of the landscape is coming into shape vey quickly.

cistern

The rainwater cistern arrived today. We're using a 3,000-gallon polyethylene tank made by Norwesco, which was sourced by the company that designed and provided our rainwater filtration system, Rainwater Management Systems. The indoor components - a pump and three filters - have already been installed, and the next step is to connect the cistern to our gutters and to the filters.

The tank weighs 404 pounds empty (12 tons when full of water), so wrangling it around the side of the house took the efforts of three steel workers, two truck drivers and one surprisingly limber professor...

grading

Yesterday, our paving company sent a Bobcat operator to grade and prepare the areas that will be paved today and tomorrow. We're using 12"x12" concrete pavers, which will sit on a compacted bed of sand. The Bobcat operator scraped away soil, sloped the front walkway and driveway down to the street, leveled the porch and patio, and then laid a bed of sand in each area.

gardening

After a long, sweaty day of moving rock and soil, giving away spare wall panels (thanks, Bill!), working out details for connecting the gutters to the rainwater cistern, filling out LEED paperwork and revising the drawings in anticipation of applying for the certificate of occupancy, I had a chance to indulge in the glorious luxury of transplanting a big basil plant from the garden of our neighbors, Leatrice and Bill. The large planting beds we're building in front of the house will eventually be filled with fruit and vegetable plants, in lieu of a front lawn. Gardening is so hard to describe - at times soothing, compulsive, satisfying and addictive - and our planting beds should provide an ever-changing foil of foliage and flora against the crisp silver finish of the house. I can't wait to start composting...

vermiculation

Preparing the planting beds gives us a chance to recycle some waste material and see if we can help promote worm growth. Worms fertilize the soil, so we want to give them some habitat and nourishment. We laid a layer of paper on the bottom of the corner planting bed in order to keep the weeds down. The recently ended school year left with with an ample supply of homework and notebooks that should serve this purpose well. On top of the paper, we laid a layer of corrugated cardboard to provide the worms with some habitat...

LED lighting

One of the hardest pieces of the sustainability puzzle for us has been selecting good lighting for the house.  Compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs are so common that it's easy to compare their visual quality and energy efficiency, but light-emitting diode (LED) lighting is still so novel that it's hard to find live displays to help us evaluate the different lighting options. It's particularly difficult to find lighting strips (as opposed to individual bulbs) installed as samples. So while everyone knows what a standard 60 watt incandescent bulb looks like, it's very hard to imagine how an 11 watt LED bulb performs, let alone a 5W/ft LED strip light.