Cotto d'Este rethinks what tile can do

One need look no further than newspaper headlines to see that utility deregulation has been a bust. As public utilities have been allowed to consolidate and behave more like private concerns, their dividends to shareholders may have increased but their rates have have gone up significantly at the same time. Similarly, a near obsession with reducing labor costs has left them with a power grid that's as prone to breakdown as any business that cuts itself off at the knees in order to maximize its quarterly earnings. With increased earnings, utilities are better able to lobby legislatures to advance their agendas. As so-called public utilities buy off legislators they're able to pass along more of their costs to their customers. The utility I deal with, Progress Energy (Soon to be Duke Energy), has managed to convince the Florida Legislature that it's a good idea to have their customers pay for a new nuclear plant before it's even built. My electrical rates will increase by nearly 50% over the next eight years to pay for this new plant. As Fukushima demonstrated so perfectly, is nuclear power capable of living up to its promise?

Clearly, a central supplier of electricity is a losing proposition. But how to get out from under unresponsive and increasingly expensive "public" utilities? This isn't a failure of government as it is a failure for government to behave like a profit-making business.

So what there is to do is to start to take responsibility for electrical power away from the utilities and to make it more local and more personal.

My travels to Europe in the last year have shown me that there are a lot of ways the US can improve on our business as usual. The technologies evident over there during trade shows do point to a way out.

The rage these days in Europe in architecture is to install ventilated facades. These facades are a way to remake a building and insulate it at the same time. But the Sassuolo-based Cotto d'Este takes the idea of a ventilated facade and turns it on its ear.

Cotto d'Este's ventilated facades make electricity.

While solar power and photovoltaic cells can't obviate the need to electrical utilities, it's an enormous leap forward. Since utilities don't feel any pressing need to actually provide the services they're tasked to do, why not set about making our own electricity?

Cotto d'Este has a ceramic product that carries a 25-year warranty and that you can walk on. That's amazing. I live in a part of the world where the sun shines for an average of 360 days per year. I look at my roof and my neighbors roofs and wonder why we're not putting them to use. Between the incredible sunshine we enjoy and the sea breezes we experience ever day, why aren't we harnessing those forms of energy? Why do we rely on a power plant that burns coal, degrades our air and dumps mercury into The Bay?

Why does burning fossil fuels hold the appeal that it does?

How did oil- and coal-based energy generation become the standard for what constitutes a prosperous society? Isn't it time to look for another answer?

Scandinavian Made, a webshop

I think I'm in love with this bowl.

Ceramicist Simon Koefoed made only one and it's available through a new webshop called Scandinavian Made.

Scandinavian Made is the brainchild of my brilliant friend Susan Serra and her daughter Kelly Serra Donovan. The Serra women's roots run deep in Denmark and Susan's long made it a habit to bring back handmade items she found on her annual trips to Denmark for her design clients.

With the recent launch of Scandinavian Made, anybody can benefit from Susan's discerning eye and love of her ancestral homeland. Here are some highlights I just pulled from her site.

There's a definite eye at work here and the whole site is a testament to her good taste and willingness to share the one-of-kind, hand crafted vases, bowls, servicewear, wall hangings and more that she finds on her travels.

Susan's one of the most generous and talented women I know and it's a pleasure to help introduce Scandinavian Made to the world. Give Scandinavian Made a look and tell Susan I sent you.

Save the dates for Coverings 2012

Coverings is a must-see show and conference for the tile and stone worlds and Coverings 2012 is coming to the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando from April 17 through April 20.

Whether you're looking for the next big idea or the bottom line, you'll find the inspiration you're after at this year's show. There are over 1000 exhibitors from 50 countries signed up so far, Coverings 2012 promises something for everybody in the architecture, builder, design and fabricator communities.

Coverings 2012 features a robust conference schedule including accredited seminars and live demonstrations led by some of the most reputable authorities in the industry. Oh, and it's all free.

So add it to your calendar and make it a point to be in Orlando on April 17th. I know I'll be there!

You can learn more and register to attend on Coverings website. See you in Orlando.

Christmas in New York

On the upper east side of Midtown Manhattan, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 50th Street, sits one of the world's most iconic department stores, Sak's Fifth Avenue.

Despite the fact that Sak's has grown into a department store chain, their 1924 building across the street from Rockefeller Center remains their flagship.

Christmas is a big deal in New York, obviously. Every year Sak's rises to the occasion and rolls out a display that integrates their historic facade.

Last year, their night time display broke new ground in projected animation with their story of "The Snowflake and the Bubble." I remember standing on the West Side of Fifth Avenue on a Friday night in mid-December last year and being blown away.




I figured that they'd spent so much money on that animation that they'd use it for a couple of years.

Clearly, I underestimated Sak's. Two weeks ago they rolled out "The Snowflake and the Bubble: The Sequel."

I don't think I'm going to make it up there before the display ends on January 6th, 2012 but this new animation makes me want to drop what I'm doing and just get on an airplane.

Seeing wasps in another light, a Blog Off post

Every two weeks, the blogosphere comes alive with something called a Blog Off. A Blog Off is an event where bloggers of every stripe weigh in on the same topic on the same day. The topic for this round of the Blog Off is "What is Home?"

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I moved to Florida nearly 20 years ago. and within those first couple of weeks I ran into what my dad would have called Florida's "bug problem."

My first exposure to Florida's insects took place in the wee hours of the morning. I was living in Orlando then and I thought that hermetically sealed suburban house I called home at the time could shield me from anything Florida could throw at me.

Hah. In the pre-dawn hours one morning I was lying in bed, drifting between consciousness and unconsciousnesss. I was on my back when I felt something crawl across my naked chest. In the same motion, I grabbed the bug crawling across me and leapt out of bed. With my heart still racing, I decided that the only good Florida bug was a dead one. That was my first exposure to the Palmetto bug. Palmettos are a large species of cockroach. Unlike most roaches, palmetto bugs don't set up house in a house. Rather they get in when they're looking for water or by mistake. I didn't know that then. To me, what had just crawled over me was the largest cockroach the northeast had ever produced. Ugh.

Despite Florida's tropical climate, I was going wage a one man war against the worst Florida could throw at me. So I spent the next 15 years or so killing anything that crawled, buzzed or spun a web. There was no pesticide strong enough so car as I was concerned.

I moved to St. Pete in 1996 and when I got here there was a bug I hadn't dealt with before. This is the Gulf Coast of Florida's mud dauber wasp.

It's commonly called the black and yellow mud dauber but technically, its real name is Sceliphron caementarium. S. caementarium is nearly three inches long and is a pretty intimating creature. When I first encountered one of them it was just another thing that was waiting to sting me and I couldn't kill it fast enough.

However, they just kept coming and wherever they ended up they would make their fist-sized nests. Every time I'd knock one down it would be full of dead spiders. That always mystified me.

At around the same time I was mystified by the contents of a mud dauber's nest the internet was taking shape and for the first time, I could track down information easily. In doing searches I found out the name of my wasp and I started to read about its way of life.

S. caementarium is a solitary wasp and once I realized that it wasn't going to sting me, I could see it for the beautiful creature it is. I mean look at it. It's abdomen pretty much defines a wasp waist. What a gorgeous animal.

Female mud daubers are skilled hunters and they hunt spiders. Once they catch one they sting it. They don't sting to kill, merely to paralyze. Once their prey's been stupefied, they transport it back to structure like this.

I took that photo on my patio yesterday.

These structures that I used to assume were nests are actually brooding chambers. It take the wasp a couple weeks to construct and it's made from soil and saliva and she makes it one mouthful at a time. It's not until it's completed that she goes about her hunting missions.

Her goal in life is to pass along her genes and she does so by building a structure, filling it with paralyzed spiders, and then laying a single egg on top of them. Once the egg's sealed into the chamber, it passes through its larval and pupal stages unseen and without any help from its parents.

Now that I know this stuff about our mud daubers I don't kill them on sight obviously. How could I kill something with such a life story? Learning about them had a couple of effects I never would have imagined. It made me reconsider the entire family of insects and the entire kingdom Insecta.

If S. caementarium had a story to tell what other bugs did? Well it turns out just about all of them do. Even my much-loathed Palmetto bug, or Eurycotis floridana, as it's more properly known. Though I still can't prevent myself from killing every palmetto bug I see, I stop and consider the rest of them. Our humble mud dauber gave me a window into a world I would have ever seen otherwise. The creatures we consider to be pests are every bit as evolved as we are. In some ways they fit their environments better than we do.