Living and loving in 450 square feet

Katie and her husband Martin live in a 450 square foot apartment in Berlin. Katie's and American ex-pat and she writes a blog called Making This Home. Her blog's about renovating all of those 450 square feet, one task at a time. She takes plenty of time along the way to tell stories about sustainability, life, love and being a stranger in a strange land. As much as I love a good ex-pat blog I have to say that what's has me so taken with Katie is the feat she and Martin performed on their 36 square foot kitchen.

That's right a 36 square foot kitchen.

But look what they've done. It's beautiful and I don't doubt for a second that it does everything they need a kitchen to do. Living big is easy, living small on the other hand takes some real skill. Skill that these two have in spades. Schöne arbeit! Glückwünsche!

Check out the rest of Katie's blog, Making it Home, here.

Ramón Coronado's art speaks quietly

Ramón Coronado is a Los Angeles-based Cross-Media Visual Designer and one of my new favorite visionaries. He calls this project Mercado Negro.

Mercado negro means "black market" in English and it consisted of a 12-week process to reclaim an artifact of urban blight and to find a new use for it. Along the way, he wanted to make a statement about the lack of parks and recreational facilities in LA.

From the Artist's Statement:

Mercado Negro is a Spanish word for Black Market. This 12 week project deals with reclaiming an ordinary, everyday object and transforming it into something with a completely different purpose. I also wanted to create a project that commented on the shortage of parks and recreational functions in Los Angeles.

Moving to Los Angeles four years ago from the small population of Cathedral City was a major eye opener. Los Angeles felt like an entirely new world separate from everything that I had known or experienced before. With little knowledge of LA and it's neighborhoods, I ended up living across the street from MacArthur Park, a dangerous lower income area, overpopulated with homeless, and trash, but with a heavy Hispanic influence.

Spending a year in this area exposed me to the lack of recreational areas for kids in Los Angeles. The irony being that I lived across from MacArthur park, but because of it’s dangerous reputation, no children would ever go there to play and often resorted to playing on the streets running in and out of traffic.

This area is filled with trash on the sidewalks, people sleeping everywhere, and an abundance of shopping carts. Shopping carts exist everywhere and anywhere throughout the city of LA and include themselves as part of LA's landscape. A shopping cart says a lot about a city. Seeing one on every block adds attention to the poverty and that there is no control of private property.

I took it upon myself to take a shopping cart and make a statement with it. I reclaimed LA's iconic shopping cart and created furniture for kids to enjoy in these urban Los Angeles areas. The project is a criticism of the scarcity of recreational functions for kids growing up in a dense city like Los Angeles.

Who thinks to take an abandoned shopping cart and actually do something with it? Over the last 30 years or so, it's become acceptable to blame the marginalized for being marginalized. Ramón Coronado's work is a clever remonstration of that entire way of thinking. Blame solves nothing and makes finding solutions more difficult. Thanks for giving me something to think about Ramón Coronado.

It's a New Ravenna give away

The great Sara Baldwin writes a blog about her art and her company, New Ravenna Mosaics. Sara has a deep love and respect for classically Roman-inspired stone mosaics and she's been writing a series called Rome if You Want to for the last couple of weeks.

In her latest installment, she tells the story of the Roman mosaics left in Tunisia and how they influence the work of New Ravenna. To make that point, Sara's giving away a copy of a rare art book, Mosaics of Roman Africa. Click on this Amazon link to see how much it's worth. Wow.

But there's hope, pop over to Sara's blog and leave a comment. She'll be drawing a lucky winner from the comments left after Rome if You Want to Part II. So enter her contest and stick around long enough to soak in some inspiration.

Particle board vs. plywood: the first follow up

OK, on Monday I wrote a post and detailed my plans for finding out what happens when a six inch by six inch sample of 3/4" veneer plywood and a six by six sample of laminated 165 lb. particle board get dumped in water and left for a few days.

The water immersion part of this test ended yesterday and before I get to what I've observed so far, let me state a couple of things. For starters, if your cabinetry ends up floating in water for a couple of days, how well it's going to hold up is the least of your problems. So the odds of immersion are slim at best. Secondly, this is not a scientific experiment by any means nor are the findings that follow some kind of a sweeping indictment or endorsement of these products' categories. All this test does do is test a hunch I had about these very specific samples. OK, with that out of the way, let's get to it.

On Sunday morning at 11:15, I dropped this sample

and this sample into two separate bowls filled with three liters of tap water.

It was 73 degrees and sunny on that fine morning and here's what the samples looked like when they first went into their watery graves.

So I went about my day and waited to see what would happen. I knew they'd be fine for the first couple of hours and sure enough they were. I fished out my samples and photographed them at 15 minute intervals for the first hour. Then I photographed them again at two hours, four hours, six hours and 12 hours. I won't bore you by showing you all of this but if you really want to see exactly what these samples looked like at any of those intervals, I'll gladly send you the images. OK, moving on.

On Monday morning, I fished them out and this is what I saw at the 24 hour mark.

Both samples were still pretty intact. The laminate on the particle board had started to to blister a little bit and its once smooth surface felt almost like an orange peel.

The plywood seemed to be faring better.

Though some of the veneer had begun to delaminate. Neither sample had warped.

At 48 hours things were a little changed but nothing really dramatic.

This is the plywood's edgebanded side. It's still pretty intact and hasn't warped.

This is the particle board's edgebanded side. The particle board's not faring as well as the plywood, but I expected that. It's still not warped but it's about a sixteenth of an inch fatter than it was 48 hours before.

From the side, the plywood looked like this. There's a little veneer delamination going on but for the most part it's still intact.

And this is the side of the particle board. Pretty much the entire surface now has that orange peel texture from the individual wood particles swelling.

At 72 hours I pulled the samples out of the water for the last time.

The particle board suffered the most.

This is the edge, fresh from the drink. The edge tape seems to have held the shelf together and the water got in through the seams along the upper and lower surfaces.

The side's pretty chewed up too. If you click on this photo it will expand and you can get a better feel for the orange peel texture this thing's adopting.

The plywood behaved a little better after 72 hours.

This is the edge of the plywood sample.

And here's its side. You can see some of the veneer bubbling along the left edge.

You can also see a seam where two pieces of veneer meet up. That's the line about 2/3 of the way up the sample.

All in all, this was nowhere near as dramatic as I expected it to be. And frankly, I thought the particle board would hold up better. The plywood's pretty unusable at this point too. I mean, any finished wood that's thrown in water for 72 hours will be toast. Despite that though, I expected both samples to be in far worse shape than they are. That's a good finding.

But we're not done yet. Each of these samples absorbed a fair amount of water over the course of this test and they are both drying out as I type this. As the absorbed water evaporates, the samples will start to shrink.

That my friends is phase two. What do you suppose will happen now? Once either of these engineered products endures a 72 hour flood, what do you think happens? Will either of them still be viable? The humidity's been pretty low so they'll dry out in a couple of days. I will photograph them one last time after they've dried. What wonders await I wonder wonder wonder?

What IS the state of the art?

The brilliant and stunning Nancie Mills-Pipgras from Mosaic Art Now sent me a link yesterday. This isn't unusual, people send me links all the time.  As is usually the case, Nancie's link was designed to get a rise out of me. Well, a rise is precisely what she got.

Check this out. The image at the top of this post is the newly re-designed lobby of the President Hotel in Times Square. The link from Nancie took me to the website of Interior Design magazine and a profile of this hotel's renovation. The President Hotel is Best Western's flagship property and they spent 15 million dollars to have 334 rooms, a fitness center, a business center, a conference facility and a lobby redesigned by the New York firm Stonehill and Taylor.

Stonehill and Taylor chose the two party political system of the United States as its theme and in a lot of ways theirs is a successful design. Successful in the sense that they managed to celebrate US politics as an idea, rather than the acrimonious practice it is. It's also successful because I had an interior design magazine to explain the theme to me. If I found myself in the lobby of The President Hotel without knowing what I was looking at I'd probably turn around and walk out.

Clever is one thing, but when clever comes at the expense of a harmonious interior I have to draw the line.

I can appreciate the thought that went into this, really. But at the same time, really? Am I missing something?

I've been thinking a lot about echo chambers lately. By being in an echo chamber I mean that someone so afflicted spends all his time listening to his own voice and voices that sound just like his. It's an easy rut to fall into. Who wants to listen to criticism or dissent? But life in an echo chamber gives anyone who spends too much time in one a pretty skewed view of the world. I get it that the grillwork in the lobby is a deconstructed US flag, but that lobby is not somewhere I'd like to hang out. I mean, how could anyone sleep in those bedrooms?

What do you guys think? Too advanced for a simple man like me to understand? Or is this an example of too much time spent in an echo chamber? Would you spend $389 for a Saturday night in one of those rooms? Tell me things.