GRAND OPENING Friday Jan 13th at the MUSE GALLERY at 365 Main Street, Longmont, CO from 6 to 9 pm.
Please do come in and see my latest work.
For those who cannot make it, the show will run for 6 weeks. Go to http://artslongmont.org/ for directions and hours.
This year’s US ski team has a new slogan: All Out! It points directly to the kind of determination and energy one has to bring into your effort, whatever that might be, in order to win. Or at least to perfect the game. The competition is so fierce, the field is so completely even, that the differences at the finish line are measured in hundreds of a second. There is a limit to how much one can train during the off season, for most it is close to eight hours a day, and most of them have maxed out on the limit. There is no doubt in my mind that because of it, this short slogan, they are doing better than they would without it. I believe that this powerful slogan actually has the power to bring in the best and improve their performance by that one hundredth of a second.
Watching these guys go for it makes me think about the effort that I am putting in every day in my art and architecture. Not even close. No wonder I start complaining that my lack of success is because of all kinds of events that are out of my control, like our present state of economy, because of lack of general appreciation for the arts, and what not, but the bottom line has to be that it is because of my lack of total committment that the All Out! requires in order to move things forward.
So, question is, what am I going to do about it?
I saw a presentation yesterday by a friend who spent some time this summer in Stockholm, Sweden. What impressed her the most was the size of the apartments where she was staying. The average Swedish urban household only measures 960 sf. Compared to the average of 2,400 sf in the USA, this seems like an impossibly small space to live in. I also found out last night that last year, 2010, was the first year since, I believe 1958, that the average size of households in the US actually diminished. It was on the continuous rise since then. If I remember correctly it used to be 1,200 sf back in 1958.
Even though the living quarters may seem small, the standard of living in Sweden is one of the highest in Europe and possibly in the world. Very few people drive at all, most use bikes to commute anywhere around town. Also, they treat the space outside of their homes/apartments as an extension of their living space. One is enclosed and the other is not, but it is still one’s own living space. Private and public.
The population density also has a lot to do with the feeling of comfort. Five to six floors apartment buildings offer the possiblity of walking around town and not needing to drive. Again, people on top of other people, mingling in the streets, healthy walk around town before retiring for the night.
This is the place where I lived until I was 18. Red arrow shows the building where our apartment was. On the fifth floor. Apartment number twenty one. School was only two blocks away, up and left from the arrow. We used to play soccer in the school yard every afternoon. Funny I remember that. High school was a bit further away. Maybe a twenty minutes walk.
This gets me to think about how really sustainable and efficient this urban model is. Population density is probably one of the most important parameters that we should be working with in our new urban studies and designs. Even if a new, clean energy source is discovered soon, and travel becomes cheap, for no other reason than of social interaction, socal sanity, so to speak, we should be going back to this model of a community living. More compact means less energy use, less heating bills, and at the same time more interaction and communication, which of course leads to less depression and loneliness. On the other hand, it is never all one sided, there is also less privacy and more noise too. Now, the actual numbers of the population density vary tremendously accross the globe, as do the overall sizes of the cities, and that has to be carefully balanced in order for the model to perform optimally. Not a new idea at all: read much more on this at http://www.newurbanism.org/density.html
Coming back to here and now, hundreds of images come alive from just seeing this one one picture. And memories of sounds and aromas, and wettness and cold, and sunshine and dust. But, I guess, you had to be there…