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.

wildlife, amphibian edition

Say hello to Bufo marinus, the Cane Toad. This is the big South American native (usually 6 inches from nose to butt) whose appetite for cane beetles led to its introduction in sugar producing regions around the world. Yes, it's the amphibian that's devastating Queensland (the Simpsons even made reference to it in their Australian episode), and yes, the cane toad is poisonous to potential predators, except for possum, possibly. But they seem to really like eating the palmetto bugs (the enormous Florida woods cockroach, Eurycotis floridana), so they're cool with us. And they make a great sound in the evening...

downspouts

Sunny morning in Miami. Gotta go work on the gutters, to make them do this, but better:

completing the cabinetry

Yesterday, our cabinet maker installed the doors and drawer fronts on the kitchen cabinets. Both the pantries (left, in progress) and the base cabinets under the sliding glass doors/window are now simple volumes clad in bamboo. The low cabinets have Haefele pulls, but we haven't yet decided on what handles to install on the pantries... it seems a shame to interrupt those gorgeous expanses of bamboo.

childhood dream realized

Remember when you were a kid and fire fighters were the coolest thing in the world? Today tin box had the awesomest group of visitors from Miami-Dade Station 14. That's right, fire fighters came over to our house and asked for a tour. And they took photos. Fire fighters took photos of our house. And they kept talking about how cool it is. Fire fighters!

I'll bet that never happened to Steven Holl.

in praise of field modifications

Our steel erectors are back for a few days to finish up some details. John (left) and Mike put up the last pieces of trim along the top ridge of the upper roof. They modified the trim to act as a raceway protecting the cables for the photovoltaic panels, eliminating the need for the clunky PVC box that normally accompanies the Uni-solar panels. This improvisation is one of the best field modifications in the project, so far.

countertop

Our cabinet maker's countertop experts installed our kitchen counter today, and it looks gorgeous. We're using Richlite, a solid-surface material made from thin layers of paper bonded with phenolic resin. The Richlite has a dense, matte finish which will become even more lustrous once we apply the finish coat after its final sanding. The black surface works really well with both the bamboo cabinetry and the painted metal finishes of the windows, walls and structural frame.

dumpster gone

We had the dumpster hauled away for the last time yesterday. In theory, our prefabricated steel frame and exterior panels reduced the amount of waste produced on site dramatically, though we honestly don't have any numbers to compare. Our disposal costs include having the refuse sorted into different recyclable materials. Besides sending the usual materials - steel, wood and cardboard - for recycling, the company also sends concrete to be crushed into gravel for road construction. We haven't yet received the final account of our waste disposal. When we do, we'll post the results.

remembering Sant'Agostino

Early this morning, an earthquake struck the region of Emilia Romagna in northern Italy. While this temblor left much less severe damage than the 2009 quake that nearly destroyed the city of L'Aquilia, it still caused several fatalities. Among the dead are two of the three workers who provided overnight monitoring of the kilns at the Ceramica Sant'Agostino tile factory. Based in the town of the same name, Ceramica Sant'Agostino made the ceramic tile we used on our bathroom walls, and it is possible that our tile was fired in the building which collapsed this morning.

Our thoughts and condolences are with the families of Nicola Cavicchi and Leonardo Ansaloni, the two Ceramica Sant'Agostino employees who perished today, as well as with the families of the other victims of the earthquake.

bouncing off the satellites, continued

Google's spy satellites have finally located tin box. The latest updated images show the house the way it was a few months ago, with all of the roof and some of the wall panels installed, but before windows and doors went in. More interesting, though, is the fact that the satellite images shown at different scales are from different photographs. When you zoom out, you get an image from last spring...

lust for lights

We've been doing a lot of shopping for light fixtures over the last two days, with a series of unsuccessful hunts for simple cord sets (literally a cord and socket with which to make a pendant lamp) leading to interesting discoveries of LED exterior lights and other things we'd had trouble finding. One of today's trips netted four lights for our bathroom vanities, sort of. We found a 20" long LED fixture by George Kovacs (left) that will be perfect in three of the bathrooms. However, the factory has a backlog of 6,000 orders to fill before we'll get our lights (we were promised mid-June) which we read as an exciting indication that energy-efficient lighting has come of age as a first choice for homeowners. This is a very good sign, not least because it suggests the economy is rebounding, but especially because companies are making, and customers are choosing, energy-efficient options. We found a similar dilemma with dual-flush toilets. A very promising sign indeed.

accidental misprision

After weeks of staring at our structural steel and drywall, it occurred to me that I’ve seen this relationship between gray structure and smooth, light walls before.

Michelangelo’s magnificent vestibule at the Laurentian library – one of the most amazing rooms in the world – is one of a number of spaces in Florence where dark pietra serena stone is carved into the Classical orders, in contrast to the creamy plaster of the surrounding wall surfaces.

imagining a garden

We spent a lot of time this week thinking about the landscape/gardens/habitat around and inside tin box this week. We laid out some of our coral rock (the bounty from our septic tank installation) to give us an idea of the broad outlines of the raised planters we want to build on the south side of the house. Holly started sketching the front in perspective to help visualize the relationship between plantings, stone and ground. We visited a neighbor with a terrific vegetable and fruit garden, and started to fantasize about what we could grow with our abundant sunshine and rainfall. We thought about what kinds of plants we can grow above a septic drainage field, and which ones we can't. And then Faichild Tropical Botanic Garden hosted their annual flowering tree sale...

buried

Last week's septic tank and drainage field excavations also gave us a chance to bury electrical power and data lines running to the house from the nearest utility pole. These conduits need to be buried 30" below the surface to protect them from inadvertent damage, whereas (strangely) the main water supply line only needs to be 12" below grade. The water line, which was laid weeks ago, is the white PVC pipe hanging in the air in this photo. It will be packed in clean (rock-free) fill to protect it from punctures after the electrical conduits are backfilled.

Why four conduits? Two are for power lines, one is for a telephone line and the fourth is for cable/internet service. Most likely, we won't use the telephone line, but it will be good to have the conduit in place, just in case. What else is buried outside tin box?

progress and gardening

Our septic tank and drainage field were installed last week. This required removing the construction fence in front of the house, which gives us our first broad views of, and from, it.

no new house smell

Our painter primed the interior partitions today (the exterior walls are prefinished, and won't be painted), which leads to two thoughts: one, the house is wonderfully bright in all types of sunlight, and two, sustainable paints have no odor.

Regarding the light, the weather changed rapidly and repeatedly today, with intense showers interspersed with strong sunlight. The white primer on the interior walls reflects the light - which is mostly indirect light from the north or from our well-shaded east- and west- facing windows and doors - throughout the house. The result is a diffuse light which reflects off the galvanized surfaces of the roof decking and the light gray concrete floor. The mood of the house changes quickly with the quality of the light outside.

But it was the complete lack of odor today that really impressed us.

on staying dry

The rain has been falling fairly steadily for a few hours in Miami, which made for a good day to check the interior of tin box for leaks. So far, it looks reassuringly dry inside. In fact, there's no sign of water inside the house, which means the roof, walls, windows, doors and vents are all working as intended. The strategies we've taken to ensure weather-tightness should help us avoid the considerable costs of repairs related to leaky roofs. These include:

Arbor Day

Happy Arbor Day!

wet construction

The tile work in the bathrooms is nearly complete. Our tiler, Sergio, has been patiently and meticulously setting the various wall and floor tiles in place. In the guest and master baths, he has had to work with a pitched floor that slopes to a drain to allow the rooms to be used as big showers. The work looks pretty excellent so far:

epiphyte club

Still recovering from our post-Earth Day hangovers, dreaming about the landscape at tin box. The house was always intended to be a pavilion at the juncture of several gardens, but our ideas regarding those gardens were always fluid, as we waited to see just what kind of spaces the house would produce. We're eager to start laying out the raised planting beds for the vegetables and fruit, position the new trees, arrange the native species that provide habitat for our local wildlife, and begin filling in the ground with interesting alternatives to the conventional lawn.

We are also just about ready to start building screens of epiphytes, or air plants, to shield the master bath from view. South Florida's bounty of air plants, like the bromeliad pictured here, force the transplanted gardner to redefine the verb to plant, with its assumption of a soil base for vegetation. We've planned to build a light armature to cover with air plants around the back corner of the house, so that we won't need curtains in the bathroom. We'll include bromeliads and orchids for their colorful flowers, and dense mats of Spanish moss for visual privacy.

detroit

Detroit has become a metonym for “urban decay,” a pejorative term that misleadingly implies that cities are primarily responsible for their own decline. As Detroit’s manufacturing economy has relocated (first to other states, then overseas) and its population has shrunk by half, the city fabric has suffered from neglect, abandonment, arson and poor redevelopment decisions. Meadows and parking lots have replaced too many buildings, leaving the city fabric as a patchwork quilt with pockets of vitality isolated by vast swaths of open space. So why is Detroit such a wonderful city?