It is hard to build in Washington DC; there is a lot of history and a lot of approvals required. Surprisingly, it is easier to build there than it is the Canadian wilderness; that is what philanthropist Joseph Hirshhorn found out when he tried to build a new town "planned towards happy living" north of Lake Huron, with Philip Johnson as his architect. Blake Gopnik writes in the Washington Post:
We recycle earlier Thanksgiving posts. Collin Dunn writes:
It's Monday, so Google must have rolled out another new feature to waste our day. Now that I have made my email look prettier I can move on to their new picture gallery of thousands of shots from Life Magazine. One amazing set found by Laure at Dwell is a 1943 series of a kitchen-of-tomorrow exhibit taken by Time/Life's Nina Leen.
We recently showed Paul Villinski's Emergency Response Studio that was a wood shop on wheels; Here is an interesting version from 1938 of a woodworking shop that would tour California schools. From Modern Mechanix...
"Frugal is the New Black" say the trendsetters. This isn't news to TreeHugger readers, nor is it particularly original; during the World Wars, that is how one lived. Sometimes people needed a little encouragement, so the the creatives got to work designing posters, telling people to save instead of spend, fix instead of buy new, grow instead of shop at the grocery, all messages that resonate today.
Have a look at a few of them in our inaugural slideshow of Frugal Green Living: Posters for the Movement
...
Imagine what it was like to walk into a room and not know what to do. When the gas companies were spreading rumors that electricity is harmful to health and will affect the soundness of sleep. Fortunately, when something is such an immediate and obvious improvement, it overcomes the naysayers and the rumors in no time flat.
via Next Nature...
We have all seen the pictures of Galveston under water because of Hurricane Ike; The last time this happened six thousand people died. Instead of moving to higher ground, they moved higher ground to Galveston. Back in May, landscape website Pruned posted on Cornelia Dean's Against the Tide: The Battle for America's Beaches:
Full Disclosure: George Nelson is my favourite designer and I am sitting at a George Nelson desk. But besides doing wonderful furniture, in the sixties he tried his hand at modern prefab, and some of the ideas are relevant to today.
Henry Ford once said "I foresee the time when industry shall no longer denude the forests which require generations to mature, nor use up the mines which were ages in the making, but shall draw its raw material largely from the annual products of the fields"
Science and Mechanics explained how in 1936: ...
We have shown rotating houses before, but this one predates them by decades- Angelo Invernizzi's house has an upper section that rests on a circular track and follows the sun, 1,500 tons powered by two motors with a total of three horsepower. ...
It is a problem that continues to this day: the depopulation of the harsher regions of northern countries, the conversion of jobs from resource extraction, farming and making things to scooping ice cream for tourists or building cottages.
In Norway, The Trybocottage was "designed in response to two needs. The first was to create more work in an area of depopulation. The other was to produce a holiday house which was easy to erect and would fit into the landscape, as part of a plan to develop tourism in the region."...
Larger version at Modern Mechanix
There is nothing new under the sun, including corn for ethanol. Farm relief advocates apparently proposed it in the depression as a way of reducing the crop surplus and getting more money for farmers. ::Modern Mechanix...
Syd Mead has been cranking out visions of the future since the distant past, including ideas for United States Steel from the early sixties that you can see on Flickr here. I had no idea he was still at it, producing drawings like this. fittingly for the Qatar Steel Corporation (does it own US Steel?).
No doubt many readers, particularly Americans, will disagree with this, but the BBC points out that "Baby", born sixty years ago in Manchester, was the first "modern" computer that one could program:
"Baby was the successor to machines such as the American ENIAC and the UK's Colossus. Both computers were able to be reprogrammed but this could involve days of rewiring. Baby was designed to overcome this limitation.
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