Google does architecture. Brace yourself.

Virtually all architecture and design is drawn on a computer any more. A couple of us can still render by hand, but I would hate to have to rely on my hand drawings to make a living. Hand renderings take a long time to produce and editing them means starting over. That's bad. Although they are pretty and I consider them to be art. But that's just me.

About 20 years ago; the worlds of drafting, design and architecture started to adopt AUTO-CAD (Computer-Aided Drafting) and other CAD-based drawing programs. AUTO CAD and its derivatives changed an industry and allowed creative professionals a means to experiment with shapes and sizes in a virtual environment. Contemporary CAD programs allow one to draw in two dimensions and then preview in three dimensions. CAD has a pretty steep learning curve and as professional software, a pretty hefty price tag. For the last 20 years, the several thousand dollar price tag and learning curve have functioned as a pretty effective barrier to entry. However, something landed on my desk a couple of weeks ago that's going to change all of that.

My dear friends at Google have rolled out a new software product called Sketch Up. Sketch Up comes in two versions; a free one for household use and a professional version that costs $500. It's not only reasonably priced, it works better than what we use now.

The world of Interior Design and Kitchen Design in particular are held captive by a irritating piece of CAD-based software called 20/20 that has a lock on the industry. I know of no one who uses it for any reason other than that they have to. 20/20 is as cumbersome as it is unstable and that's being kind. Since the company who makes it has no competition, they never need to improve it. About the only thing I trust it to do is crash unexpectedly. An architectural drawing program that can't add and subtract reliably is a problem waiting for a solution. An entire profession that ready to rise up in revolution is a market waiting for someone to come to the rescue.

Enter Google and Sketch Up. I downloaded it a couple of weeks ago and have been playing around with it since. It rethinks a lot of the ways that CAD works and streamlines the process of creating a rendering. Even though it's streamlining the process, it's not cutting any corners. I cannot get over the level of control left in the hands of the operator.

The biggest difference between Sketch Up and CAD is that you draw in three dimensions in Sketch Up. This takes a little getting used to when you're accustomed to drawing in two dimensions. But man, is it cool or what? It can pull off a rendering so quickly it makes my head spin. I whipped out this bathroom in about two minutes this morning. It's basic of course, but I was trying to make a point. Drawing the same bathroom in 20/20 would have taken a half an hour.

Changing that bathroom to a living room with a different color scheme took a whopping four minutes. The same change would have taken another half hour in 20/20 not including re-boot time, because an operation like that would have made it crash at least once. Sketch Up is amazing.

The home version will allow you to draw architectural renderings, or package designs or make art. It will also enable you to draw a building and then insert it in your copy of Google Earth. Astounding!

Go get your own copy!

http://www.sketchup.com/

Out! Out! Damed lawn!

My beloved St. Petersburg Times is running an article in their Homes section today that concerns another great idea in the quest for sustainable development. There is a movement afoot, albeit a small one, to rethink the great American lawn. Here's the link: http://www.sptimes.com/2008/03/01/Homes/Lawn_begone__Replacin.shtml

According to research conducted by the University of Florida's department of Agricultural Engineering, 62% of the potable water supply in Central Florida gets sprinkled onto lawns and landscapes. Nationwide, the figure is 58%. http://irrigation.ifas.ufl.edu/

I'd be curious to see how much the plant to the left, St. Augustine grass, costs the Florida economy. Hmmm. Faced with a lingering drought and a burgeoning population, labeling this and all turf grasses as a menace wouldn't be an extreme measure. That the Florida Aquifer is on trouble is beyond debate. One need only drive across Alligator Alley and see the wreckage of the Everglades to know that something's wrong. Watch an algae bloom unfold in an estuary or body of water in the aftermath of a summer thunderstorm. The fish gasping for air at the surface are being choked out by algae fed by residential fertilizer run off. Landscaping practices in Florida and the rest of the country as they are currently conceived are unsustainable.

Municipal water supplies are a public resource and decisions regarding its use an continued supply are of grave, public concern. A suburban half acre of lush, green St. Augustine is behind Florida's current water woes. It is not sole province of the Left to be concerned about this. Re-thinking the American lawn is a viable route of exploration to think our way out of the current drought and to avoid further water problems down the road.

Today's Times story was a brief-how to guide to follow to remove a lawn and replace it with less demanding landscape plants. It linked to a blog on the subject, http://www.lesslawn.com/ and to a web site from the state of Florida that is a resource for what sorts of plants can make up a healthy, sustainable Florida landscape. The state website, http://www.floridayards.org/, is a tremendous place to read more about xeriscaping (the practice of using low-maintenance and native plants in landscaping).

Expecting people to replace the typical landscape to the left overnight is ridiculous and a fool's errand, unfortunately. The good life taking part in a grassy back yard is pretty deeply ingrained. However, urging people to replace parts of their lawns gradually is bound to be met with more acceptance. So if that water-hogging vista could be made to look like this one, the people who live there can cut their water use by 30 to 40 per cent. They get a more inviting and interesting place to live and it costs less money to maintain.

Less water, fewer pesticides, less maintenance, fewer resources and it looks good. It is time Florida, it is time.

Here's a toilet with a twist

When I was a wee lad, my family had a cottage in rural Ontario where we would go every summer for vacation. It was rural on a scale that makes my head spin now, but at the time it was a great adventure. We had no electricity, no running water and we had what I now know to be a pit toilet in the bathroom. It was an awful, foul-smelling affair; essentially an indoor outhouse. A pit toilet is a toilet with a large hole in the bottom of it. The toilet sits over a cistern and whatever goes into it lands with a splash after a short delay. But when you're that far from civilization and you have no access to running water, hygienic options are limited. Unpleasant to remember as an adult and the horror to end all horrors when you're nine. Anyhow, I like to keep an eye on the horizon with regard to home building trends and sustainability is very much one of my buzzwords. What does this have to do with a pit toilet in an otherwise charming cottage in the middle of nowhere? Pay attention. I was watching a TV show on sustainable building recently and the show's host dropped in on the Bronx Zoo to check out a new public restroom they built. The Eco Restroom at the Bronx Zoo accommodates a half million people a year and uses 3 oz. of water for each time one of those visitors flushes a toilet. The host was saying that the eco-restroom saves a million gallons of water a year using a composting system instead of the typical low-flush toilets required by building codes. I heard composting toilet and flashed back immediately to the pit toilet of my childhood. But I kept watching, despite my negative associations. It turns out that a composting toilet is nothing like a pit toilet. It is an odorless, closed system that turns human waste into fertilizer. Most of them use no water at all, but the system the Bronx Zoo uses a tiny bit of water to generate foam from biodegradable soap. This foam allows a foam-flush composting toilet to look and behave like a conventional toilet. The image above and to the right is how one looks, and below is a diagram that shows how it works. Our society expends tremendous resources securing a safe, clean water supply for everyone. Then as individuals, we turn around and flush 40% of that clean, safe water down the toilet. If that weren't wasteful enough, the resulting effluent needs to be treated at more great expense only to be dumped into nearest body of water after the solids have been removed. Yet no one seems to know why red tide blooms are so bad in my beloved Gulf of Mexico. This system, like so many other ones, is unsustainable. It's unsustainable economically as well as environmentally. But there's a solution out there and utilising that solution will require that folks get over some of their squeamishness on the topic. The system at the Bronx Zoo was installed by a company called Clivus Multrum  in Massachusetts. Clivus Multrum refined and brought to market the idea of a modern, composting toilet more than 30 years ago. Clivus also invented the foam-flush toilet. How their system works is pretty simple and straightforward. Human waste is kept in an enclosed chamber and time, biology and gravity work together to turn that waste into fertilizer. There's no stink, no mess, no polluted groundwater, no expenses related to what to do with it. Not to get all granola or anything, but what it does too is return to the soil the nutrients you didn't need. There is a whole subculture out there dedicated to composting toilets I'm learning, and a clearinghouse for information on the subject is a website called Composting Toilet World. That sounds like the name of a particularly spooky campground or something, but they have some really great information and resources. Now I love the idea of a dual-flush toilet, but the idea of a composting toilet takes the idea embodied in a dual-flush and takes it to an extreme the purist in me loves. All Hail Clivus Multrum!

Can a toilet be Modern?

I have been granted a tremendous opportunity to design a Modern bathroom. I mean a really Modern one filled with all of the glory and wonder that minimalism can bring to a space.

I've done Modern-ish ones before, in the style we call "Transitional Contemporary" in the trade. Transitional Contemporary is not Modernism, although it gets mistaken for it with alarming regularity. Transitional Contemporary can be attractive and fun, and because it's such a loosely-defined term, it's really flexible. As a designer, I have a lot more leeway in Transitional Contemporary because I don't have to be such a stickler for form.

Most times, when I'm putting together a plan for a bathroom, I put the toilet in a separate water closet inside of the main bath. I do that nearly by reflex because that's what everybody does when you have the room for it. Just put the thing behind a door and then you don't have to think about it any more.

I've never really thought about why everybody does it that way, but my current Modern Bathroom may have given me the explanation.

The American toilet looks like this and has since the dawn of indoor plumbing. Sure, there are some variations on this theme, but the typical toilet available in the US today looks just like the one that was in the house where your grandmother grew up. That this is what a toilet looks like now and always has is at the root of why people like me shutter them away in water closets out of reflex. I mean, who wants to look at that?

When I go through my catalogs of modern pluming fixtures, I see beautifully minimalist sinks and shower pans and faucets but invariably, there is no toilet in the collection. I suppose that since everyone keeps them out of sight, there's no need. Well, my current project is one of the exceptions to the have-enough-room-for-a-water-closet kind of master baths. I don't have enough room to hide anything but the plumbing, and this baby's going to be a wide open space. Finding a Modern toilet that will look great with the modern sink, tub, shower and faucets I'm already looking at will be tough. Or at least I thought until I came upon my new friends at Blu Bathworks (http://www.blubathworks.com/) this morning.

Blu Bathworks is a Canadian company that does virtually nothing but make and sell Modern plumbing fixtures. As an added bonus, all of their products strive to maximize the efficiency of their water use and utilize technologies like the dual-flush toilet I've written about previously. In keeping with the Modernist propensity to shrink the profiles of ordinary objects, a lot of their toilets appear to be tankless such at the Metrix to the right. The toilet still has a water tank, it's just hidden in the wall behind the toilet. That hide-the-tank-in-the-wall mechanism is called an in-wall carrier system and is itself a pretty slick piece of engineering. But not content with toilets, Blu has a line of coordinating bidets. Bidets make some people giggle and feel uncomfortable. There a lot of chatter about them being unecessarily indulgent. Let me state for the record that the people generating that chatter have never spent a whole lot of time with a bidet. Spend a week with easy access to one and you will never think of them as foolish again. Man! Talk about hygeine!

Let's talk about sinks ba-by

Somebody asked me about "farm sinks" today and I launched into one of my odes of joy on the subject. But first, let's clarify the language we're using. The correct term for them is "apron-front" not "farm." A lot of times, you can see these sinks in some pretty countrified kitchens and I'll admit that some of them do lend themselves to that particular "style," if I can use that word.

However, using the term "farm" to describe them does do a disservice and it paints them into an unnecessary corner. They are not so much countrified as they are traditional. To the right is a Shaw's Original, which started the whole thing in 1897. The Shaw's is still made by Rohl (http://www.rohlhome.com/) and one of the things that makes a Shaw's a Shaw's is that it's made from fire clay. Fire clay is a very specific kind of high temperature ceramic. It is the same thing that blast furnaces are lined with. When it's used as a kitchen sink, it is a material that's impervious to both insult and injury. Unlike a lot of materials, you can scrub fire clay to your heart's content and you will not scratch it. It doesn't stain in the first place, so if you do end up with a can of Ajax in your hand you might want to take a look at that. Anyhow, the Shaw's is a classic and as such it works well with virtually any aesthetic, from traditional to modern.

Once you leave the Shaw's behind though, there are a nearly uncountable number of options out there and I'm seeing a lot more of these things being made from metal. Here's a more traditional metal sink by Native Trails (http://www.nativetrails.net/). This sink is actually hand made from hammered copper with a layer of nickel over top of it. Copper is a highly reactive metal and it takes a long time for it to achieve something approaching a uniform patina. It'll be gorgeous when it gets there, but it will be anything but along the way.

The beauty to the left is a 12-gauge stainless steel sink from Bates and Bates (http://www.batesandbates.com/). The lower the gauge number the thicker the metal. A $200 sink from a home center will be 20-gauge and that's a hair thicker than aluminum foil. At 12-gauge, this baby will lack the tell-tale sound that people associate with dropping something into a metal sink. No gong here. That it's pieced and welded together instead of being stamped (the flat bottom is a dead give away) along with the superior grade of the metal are why this is a $3500 kitchen sink. You can pick yourself up now. Strange as it may sound, the world is full of people who will spend that kind of jack on a sink.

Kohler (http://www.kohler.com/) came out with their stainless steel apron-front a couple of years ago and I think I've used the Kohler Verity more than any other apron-front sink in my kitchen work. While still by no means an inexpensive sink, the Verity is more like The People's version of the Bates and Bates. Still gorgeous, though the metal isn't as low a gauge. It can be found for anywhere from $800 to $1000.

Due in a large part to their traditional roots, most apron-fronts are single bowl sinks. Since running a dishwasher is a less-wasteful use of electricity and water than hand washing dishes(counter intuitive I know but true true true), having a single bowl looks better and is all most people need. However, there are double bowls out there and our friends at Blanco (http://www.blanco.de/) have a really nice one. Blanco is a German brand that exceeds the stereotype of German efficiency and innovation. Good Lord I love a right angle and that sink over there has enough to keep me happy for the rest of my life.

So I think I'd be willing to say that although the apron-front sink is not new, it is very NOW.