Thinking God (original) (raw)
Art: Francis Picaba, “New York” (1913)
I began my restaurant career as a dishwasher at age 15 and worked my way up to a general manager’s position when I was 28. Alas, it was not to last: the Great Recession forced my company out of business, but I realized that I finally had a chance to go back to college, something I had been trying to do with little success since I had graduated high school. My daughter - born while I was in high school - began college the same semester that I began attending full-time university at Grand Valley State. I’m a first generation college graduate and the first of my extended family to earn a bachelor’s degree. My daughter is the second.
I’ve traveled broadly and studied abroad in Hungary, Poland, and Romania, all on scholarships. Living and studying in Eastern Europe, behind the no-longer-existent but no less mysterious ‘Iron Curtain,’ was a dream that I had never believed I would come true. I found myself bewildered by my freedom to read and write and study, unburdened by the grueling hours of restaurant work, free from financial worries, free from health worries (I’d had a kidney transplant and stumbled through litany of health issues due to the transplant, all of which had finally receded and left me in the best health of my life), and free from the doubt that I was somehow an imposter who did not deserve to take master’s courses at European universities older than the United States. I quickly embraced my newly blessed life.
Upon returning from Romania in March 2014, I found myself floundering again in the restaurant biz, but, thanks to a tip from a friend working in a residential home for refugees, I was able to get my foot in the door there and work my way up from part-time youth specialist working overnights, to being promoted to assistant supervisor of the unit. I’d managed to find a very special niche working with traumatized - but resilient and hopeful! - children from the world’s most grisly, protracted conflict zones, and related, somewhat tangentially, to my degree, but solidly grounded in my desire to give back something to the world.
Working with 'my boys’ has been like a kind of healing. I feel like I have been emancipated from a selfish, myopic worldview. I’m not interested in simply working for a salary. Of course it is important to have financial well-being, to feel like one is stashing something away for retirement, to be able to take that occasional trip to Europe, but more important than ever for me is the smile, the 'Aha! Moment’ of a learning child, the grateful return of a former resident, who, after graduating, comes back to visit, and says, “I Get It! You were right! Thank you, Mr. Shawn.” In other words, I’ve never felt the satisfaction in the restaurant business that I have felt over the course of the past few years while working with 'the boys.’ Never have I felt so connected to the world, or felt like the small ripple I’ve caused could become a wave of optimism in my community.
Now I am ready to take another step. As a young man, I wasn’t a good people manager. I was too caught up in bottom lines and profit-and-loss statements. Eventually, though, after the kidney transplant, I learned and began to see the people I managed not as tools, but as people struggling to navigate a tumultuous world and who were all doing the best that they could. I decided it was time to step out of the restaurant and find a way to give back to the world that had given the son of a foundry worker and a stay-at-home mom so much. I went to college. I graduated with honors. And then I found my dream job as a residential home supervisor. I teach there, I mentor there, I ache there, I rejoice there. My challenge now is to find a career that combines my managerial skills with my passion-for-teaching skills. If I had a nickel for every time someone told me that I would make an excellent teacher, I wouldn’t be writing this. Alas, though, folksy sayings don’t pay the bills. But compassion and commitment might.
Filed under teachingfutureteachernycnewyorknewyork
(via arch-daily-blog)
SN: From the Economist comes “Parkageddon”. The concept seems so simple but so few cities in North America seem to be onboard. Size is not a distinguishing factor here, all population centers should be aware of the impact that parking has on their environment from both a health and aesthetic standpoint. Cities should be designed for communities to gather not as Walmart parking lots.
How not to create traffic jams, pollution and urban sprawl; Don’t let people park for free
…parking influences the way cities look, and how people travel around them, more powerfully than almost anything else. Many cities try to make themselves more appealing by building cycle paths and tram lines or by erecting swaggering buildings by famous architects. If they do not also change their parking policies, such efforts amount to little more than window-dressing. There is a one-word answer to why the streets of Los Angeles look so different from those of London, and why neither city resembles Tokyo: parking.
For as long as there have been cars, there has been a need to store them when they are not moving—which, these days, is about 95% of the time. The parking problem in the US can be loosely traced to 1923, when Columbus, Ohio began to insist that builders of flats create parking spaces for the people who would live in them. “Parking minimums”, as these are known, gradually spread across America. Now, as the number of cars on the world’s roads continues to grow, they are spreading around the world.
The harm caused begins with the obvious fact that parking takes up a lot of room. A typical space is 12-15 square metres; add the necessary access lanes and the space per car roughly doubles.
The more spread out and car-oriented a city, as a result of enormous car parks, the less appealing walking and cycling become. Besides, if you know you can park free wherever you go, why not drive? The ever-growing supply of free parking in America is one reason why investments in public transport have coaxed so few people out of cars, says David King of Arizona State University. In 1990, 73% of Americans got to work by driving alone, according to the census. In 2014, after a ballyhooed urban revival and many expensive tram and rapid-bus projects, 76% drove.
Free parking is not, of course, really free. The costs of building the car parks, as well as cleaning, lighting, repairing and securing them, are passed on to the people who use the buildings to which they are attached. Restaurant meals and cinema tickets are more pricey; flats are more expensive; office workers are presumably paid less. Everybody pays, whether or not they drive. And that has an unfortunate distributional effect, because young people drive a little less than the middle-aged and the poor drive less than the rich. In America, 17% of blacks and 12% of Hispanics who lived in big cities usually took public transport to work in 2013, whereas 7% of whites did. Free parking represents a subsidy for older people that is paid disproportionately by the young and a subsidy for the wealthy that is paid by the poor.
A few crowded American cities, including San Francisco, have watered down their parking minimums. One shrinking city (Buffalo, in New York state) has abolished them entirely. But most of the country seems to be stuck with a hugely costly and damaging solution to the parking problem. And the American approach to parking is spreading to some of the world’s fastest-growing cities.
SN: Click through to the article for more examples and proposed solutions. It’s worth the read.
Interesting take on the detrimental effects of parking.
(Source: economist.com, via doctorcrowd)
Absolute Architecture / LOKOMOTIV Architects
The central Veneto area, lying approximately between Padua, Treviso, Castelfranco and Mestre, has one of the most unusual settlement systems of northern Italy. This project, by LOKOMOTIV Architects, starts from the view that the phenomena of urban sprawl should be stemmed, as the sprawl gives rise to a great number of problems, among which we might mention the excessive proliferation of infrastructures, with costs for the government that are unsustainable in the long run and break the delicate environmental balance of the system created by roman agriculture colonization.
Source: Archdaily
(via doctorcrowd)
Chinese Metro Evolution, 1990-2020.
(Source: pdovak.com, via doctorcrowd)
Walled City 圍城
In the words of the artist Andy Yeung:
The Kowloon Walled City was once the densest place on Earth. Hundreds of houses stacked on top of each other enclosed in the center of the structure. Many didn’t have access to air or open space. This notorious city was finally demolished in 1990s. However, if you look hard enough, you will notice that the city is not dead. Part of it still exists in many of current high density housing apartments where the only view out the window is neighbor’s window. I hope this series can get people to think about claustrophobic living in Hong Kong from a new perspective.
Follow the Source Link for images sources and more information.
(Source: architectureatlas.wordpress.com, via doctorcrowd)
Photo-Op for a Failing Autocrat
You’re kidding yourself if you think this about human rights and compassion…
“Trump condemned Obama for considering a strike against Assad for the 2013 chemical weapons attack and demanded he go to Congress for approval. On the campaign trail, Trump often implied that he would work with Assad and Russia to fight terrorism. The real problem, he repeatedly insisted, was the Islamic State rather than Bashar Assad. We have heard repeatedly that Trump was a realist and was not interested in foreign intervention. Just days ago, senior members of the administration seemed to accept that Assad was here to stay. Yet, after this week’s chemical weapons attack, Trump was apoplectic and said there would be a response. And there was. While the chemical attack was undeniably horrific, Assad has been killing civilians with bullets and bombs for years in far greater numbers. To be direct, it scares me how quickly and casually Trump changed a longstanding policy preference on a major issue — especially one that involves death and destruction — and for reasons that are, to put it lightly, unclear. I worry what that portends for decisions on war and peace over the next four or eight years.” - Ryan Evans
Trump to Obama: Don’t Attack Syria
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/06/politics/trump-tweet-syria-obama/
Kill Your Party
http://thebaffler.com/salvos/time-bandits-perlstein
The link above is an excellent read on why America will not fall apart during Trumptime and how America has always been roiled by reactionary rage and political terror. There has never been a peaceful period of American history. Quite the opposite. Perlstein in right in asserting that America has always been in a perpetual state of upheaval or varying magnitude. But let me givea bit more context to his argument. In fact, despite how we may perceive the ‘upheaval’ taking place now, 2016 is Disneyland compared to the horror of 1877, 1919-21, '45-46, 1968-1975, and 1995. We always survive. This time will be no different. Different this time, though, is the source of division and upheaval. This time folks worldwide are reacting to civilizational changes in much they same way they reacted in the last couple decades of the 19th century as we transitioned from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy and began to see the beginnings of the global capitalist financial system. The logic of that system has become normalized and we are now confronted with the reality of an integrated, interdependent, global economy. Local realities now compete with global realities. Some call this the arrival of the 'glocal.’ What does it mean? It means that financial institutions have degraded the more than 400 year-old notion of the sovereign nation-state that by definition is in charge of its own fate. We now have countless other international actors other than nation-states. International organizations, NGO’s, terrorist groups. stateless international conglomerates with profits dwarfing the majority of nation-states. megacities negotiating treaties and partnerships outside of governments, waves of immigrants - legal and illegal - changing demographics and stressing social systems, etc. What does it all mean? It means that globalization is the reality. There is no stopping it. Isolation is no an option. The fate of the American worker is welded to workers in China, India, and Mexico. Imposing tariffs on Chinese and Mexican goods only harms American workers. Trade wars are impossible. It means that the American govt is no more capable of rescinding treaties and abrogating alliances any more than doing away with gravity or the Moon’s orbit. All those anti-globalist policies that the next president is supposedly going to do away with fantasies. The only choice workers have now is to adjust to their new glocality. Many won’t and they’ll be left behind, just as blacksmiths and carriage builders were left behind when Ford began producing his first Model T. This change is too massive for you to stop. And if you think that your political party can help you, you are fooling yourself.
Curd Lake - Young Waves from The Calvert Journal on Vimeo.
Filed under vimeo
The Return of Scale and Grandeur
In the distant past, in ancient Egypt, in medieval France, architects and engineers innovated massive structures into existence seemingly by sheet willpower and imagination. Giza, apparently the product of simple geometry, is really enigma. We still don’t really know how it was achieved. We can guess, and many have formulated ingenious hypotheses as to how such precision was achieved and how, on such a grand scale. such enormity was built. With the great medieval cathedrals, we have a greater understanding of how architects such as Christopher Wren conjured flying buttresses and stained glass miracles from the cauldron of his imagination. We understand, yet we still marvel. What is know about the labor that put these structures together in ancient Egypt and medieval Europe is that two key elements were essential to their completion: time and manpower. Time could mean several decades, and even a century. Manpower meant harnessing the countryside for disposable labor or ‘slaves,’ if you will. I used to think when I looked around at the international style of architecture of the 70′s,80′s and 90′s, that we would never again see such magnificent structures as were produced by the masters of antiquity. There were, and are still, the great neo-Gothic works of Chicago and NYC. Perhaps those were the last. The Twin Towers represented for me a powerful example of the banality of the internationalist style. Steel, concrete, massive, less compelling even than the Brutalist structures. Who, I thought, would will be willing to invest the billions required to achieve the sublime workmanship of the Egyptians, the medievals, or the great American industrialists? The economics didn’t work anymore, I thought. Beauty, intricacy, delicacy, all too expensive to produce on a massive scale. And seemingly, too, they went against the grain of the structural-functionalism of cold capitalism.
But I was wrong…
.Jean Nouvel has shown that if the great billionaires are willing to spend the cash, he has the vision to create structures as grand and as magnificent as the old masters. Now, it is no longer time or labor, that are obstacles, but cash. As wealth becomes more concentrated, perhaps the ultra-wealthy will be willing to dispose of it on ever greater scales, creating structures just as grand and massive as the pyramids, the cathedrals, and the neo-Gothic masterpieces. I think, yes, it will happen.
Filed under jeannouvel
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