Cool new appliance thing

This is a new soda maker from a British company called Soda-Club. I found this through the great website from Dwell Magazine. I stopped dead in my tracks when I came across this thing. I drink a lot of club soda, I would say that it's my beverage of choice and that would still be an understatement. Nothing satisfies my thirst like a cold seltzer. It has no calories and no foul-tasting artificial sweeteners.

I used to buy San Pellegrino, but then I realized that Pellegrino is carbonated tap water. Ditto Perrier and the rest of them. If it's not just filtered tap water, then it's filtered spring water mixed with filtered tap water and then carbonated. Yet another marketing ploy in other words. A couple of years ago I got smart and started buying less-expensive seltzer in cans. Then I started becoming aware of the amount of solid waste my club soda habit was generating so I switched to two liter bottles of the stuff. I recycle the plastic bottles, but I still don't like the idea of drinking out of plastic.

For I while, I was making my own seltzer with an old-school soda syphon. The kind that use the small, disposable CO2 cartridges like in an old movie. But that's not a workable solution either. The cartridges are hard to come by and I went through them ridiculously fast.

But now I think I've found a solution in the Soda-Club Fountain Jet. It uses no electricity, it's attractive, I fill a reusable bottle with my own filtered tap water and presto change-o, real club soda. The Fountain Jet also comes with sweetened flavors that will allow one to make alternatives to Coke or Mountain Dew or any of the rest of them, only without using high-fructose corn syrup. No high-fructose corn syrup means no diabetic obese kids.

Best of all, this thing will allow me to imbibe in my club soda habit while saving money and generating zero solid waste. That's a one-two punch that sings to me, it really sings to me!

Do something positive

I took a week off of blogging last week but I'm back. I suppose it was a dry run for the ten days off I'm taking when I go on vacation in less than three weeks. Hot Dog!

Anyhow, I took a week off to think deep, design-related thoughts. Part of that process is coming up ways to position myself as a part of the solution to the global challenges of environmental degradation, climate change, efficient use of natural resources ad infinitum. Seriously, I urge people to use water filters for their drinking water to get them off the bottled water to cite an example. It's funny how snowed most people have become by the bottled water industry and it's happened so quickly it's downright shocking when you think about it. Seriously, think about how exotic and indulgent Evian seemed ten years ago. Now they sell the stuff a quickee marts along with 30 other brands of bottled water. Most of those brands are filtered tap water, all of 'em cost more than a buck, and all of 'em are bottled in pseudo-estrogen-leaching future solid waste. STOP USING BOTTLED WATER PLEASE.

Vestergaard Frandsen has developed a personal water filter called a Life Straw. Life Straw is an over sized drinking straw with an on board water filter. A single Life Straw can provide safe drinking water for an individual for a year-and-a-half. They cost two dollars. For two dollars, already crapped-upon people in the developing world won't die from waterborne diseases. That's a little more than cost of a single bottle of Fiji. Vestergaard Frandsen has also developed a larger version of the Life Straw that can purify the water for a whole family for the same period of time. The whole-family version costs $25 --that's less than I paid for my Brita and I have safe drinking water to begin with

Project H is a humanitarian, non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of the impoverished by distributing products such as Life Straw. Project H is now running an initiative to distribute Life Straw Family filters in Mumbai. For $25 dollars, you can provide safe drinking water to a family in India. And all you have to do is charge it through their website. So rather than buying cases of water at Publix this week, why not pass on it and make a donation to Project H instead? I did it this afternoon, sponsored a Life Straw Family that is. Think about it.

I love a solution!!!

I love a solution and I hate writing bitter and complaining blog entries. To redeem myself for my last slide into bitch mode, I just found this:



This is the Quench shower system from a plumbing company in Australia called Quench Showers, easily enough. The Quench is a dual mode shower system made for an Australian market suffering from water use restrictions most American can't imagine but will have to live with sooner rather than later. The dual mode of the Quench allows one to shower normally and then after rinsing off, the user can then switch the shower to recirculating mode and stay in there for the rest of the day without using any more water. Brilliant! Watch the video and then hatch a plan to bring them to the US and make millions in the process. Who says responsibility has to involve sacrifice and penury?!

Enough with the bottled water already!

If you need another reason to stop using bottled water, this weeks' finding that Bisphenol A (an ingredient in polycarbonate plastics) is of "some concern" regarding its harm to human health is one more to add to the pile. So not only is bottled water a scam to sell over priced, filtered tap water to a gullible public; a way to use up even more increasingly expensive and scarce petroleum on packaging; and a way to generate even more solid waste. Bottled water will make your daughters hit puberty at age nine and cause who knows what else in everybody.

From the LA Times,

A controversial, estrogen-like chemical in plastic could be harming the development of children's brains and reproductive organs, a federal health agency concluded in a report released Tuesday.

The National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, concluded that there was "some concern" that fetuses, babies and children were in danger because bisphenol A, or BPA, harmed animals at low levels found in nearly all human bodies.

Read the article, and others like it and pretty soon you'll see that this research is the first official finding that wasn't bought and paid for by the plastics industry. This is not news, I've been reading about pseudo estrogens in plastics for at least the last ten years. I had no idea of their omnipresence until this week though. "BPA is found in nearly all human bodies," the report said. Think about that. In yet another example of industries' complete inability to police themselves, chemicals like BPA are swimming around unseen and unknown in all of us and it's only now that someone raises a red flag. What other harmful substances am I harboring and don't know about? Wait a minute, I don't want to know.

This is not solely a concern of the granola-eaters and fringe elements of the environmental movement. This is another glowing example of the unsustainability of life as we've come to know it in the last 50 years. The move to plastic packaging happened because it was supposedly cheaper, and cheaper was supposed to mean better. As with just about anything, looking for cheaper is a short term goal that always carries with it a host of unintended consequences. All I can say is please give me back my glass bottles.

What's modern and what's contemporary?

I had a client come to me some months ago and she wanted to do a gut and re-do to the first floor of her house. As we discussed the direction she wanted to go with her renovation, she repeatedly used the term "modern." As in "I want everything to look modern." She didn't show any photos or clippings she'd collected that looked like what she wanted and I didn't have her go through any of my books so she could show me things that she liked the way I usually do. She was pretty determined to get what she wanted and what she wanted was Modern in her words.

I work in how things look, but I have to describe how those things look in pretty exact terms. Modern means something very specific to me. It means no ornamentation, it means simple lines, it means repetitive shapes. Modernism relies on the big picture to set a mood. Modernism asks you to step back and take in the whole thing rather than concentrate on smaller vignettes and details. Modernism is the Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue. Modernism pares down forms to their barest essence and asks questions of me like "how to I maintain total function while using the fewest numbers of shapes?" Modernism makes people live simple and uncluttered lives, modernism makes someone throw away the junk mail as it arrives and pay their bills on time. Modernism is minimalism. Always. I love Modernism. I love it I love it I love it.

I set about a plan for my client and I took a good week-and-a-half to complete some preliminary drawings and find some samples of the finishes I would use in her newly Modern home. Modernism is a classic --it's timeless. I love telling myself that my designs for a client will stand the test of time and I was pretty happy with the direction I was taking this client's home.

She hated it and I had to re-do everything. I lost another week coming up with a new direction. It wasn't a total loss though. Armed with my concept drawings, we now had something to talk about and she could show me what she wanted. Unfortunately, the drawings were examples of exactly what she didn't want. She wanted ornamentation. She wanted small picture stuff. She wanted every sight line in her renovated home to feature a series of focal points that related to one another. She wanted crown moldings and inlaid floors and paneled appliances. She wanted original and she wanted something very now. About five minutes into my presentation I saw that I'd missed the mark completely and I did so because we weren't using the same vocabulary.

She had been using the term Modern to describe Contemporary. Contemporary is a very different thing from Modern. Contemporary means Now. Contemporary isn't timeless and a classic. There's absolutely nothing wrong with Contemporary, it's just another thing all together. Contemporary is never minimalist and that's the easiest way to identify it.

Using architecture as an example again, if Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim on the Upper East Side is Modern, then Michael Graves' Swan Hotel at Disney is Contemporary. The Swan Hotel is a marvel --it's impossible to walk around it when you're in a hurry. There is so much going on with it, yet all of its parts combine into a cohesive whole. As with anything Michael Graves designs, it has a sense of whimsy about it that makes it sit perfectly in the middle of an amusement park. The Guggenheim on the other hand sits on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 89th Street in a neighborhood lined with tall apartment buildings and across from the leafy expanse of Central Park. Its rounded lines form a perfect bridge between the hard surfaces and lines of the buildings on the east side of Fifth Avenue and the trees in the park on the west side. It's also impossible to hurry past, but because its simple facade contrasts so strongly with its surroundings.

The lesson? If you're going to embark on a renovation and you're going to talk to a designer about it, start a clip file of things you like. Be sure that you and whoever you're talking to share a vocabulary. My lesson? Anybody who comes to me without such a clip file is going to spend some time in my design library. Clients and I need to speak the same language, even if we have to make one up.