Burnin’

Chris Corrigan of Bowen Island, British Columbia, makes a great point about the world becoming large again (and what our response might be).

When airline travel becomes prohibitive and fuel costs make transporting goods too expensive, the world will begin to unshrink, find its real size again. And in that moment, I had a strong image of the world uncrumpling and in the folds and cracks, new local creativity, food, sustenance, culture and life will unfold.

It makes sense to take a stand for a place now. To have a place where you can contribute to the local resources and the local life.

Spend any time in Austin today and you’ll see sharp looking modern homes popping up in historic neighborhoods every direction from the Capitol. With their funny shapes and bold colors, they are hard to miss.

Austin culture ‘zine, Odic Force, is reporting on the action.

Nobody said living in modernity was easy. Even so, more and more people in Austin are taking the plunge. The trend is noticeable all over the city. Scattered along streets like North Loop and Live Oak between South 1st Street and South 5th Street, Woodrow Avenue north of Koenig Lane, and in various parts of neighborhoods like Bouldin Creek and Hyde Park, houses have materialized that may as well been teleported there by aliens bent on taking over the real estate market. These structures tend to throw conventional home design out the energy-efficient window. They have angles where traditional homes have straight lines. They have straight lines where normal homes have curves. They hoard light where other homes collect shadows.

Modern Austin kindly offers page after page of modernist imagery and links to listings.

As I was clicking around, I also stumbled upon this Lake Flato modernist masterpiece on 17 acres in Kyle, TX, which one can rent for the night.

German, Dutch and British retirees looking for some southern sunny weather are finding it in Puglia, at the heel of the Italian boot.

According to The Wall Street Journal, one of the draws is the trulli — the cone-roofed structures that dot the countryside. The most basic trulli are one-room, round huts constructed of stacked, dry stones, which form walls and a simple vaulted cone roof. They date back to as early as the 14th century, and most housed peasants or livestock — or both.

The recent trulli boom is partly a continuation of the foreign-fueled real-estate speculation that began in Tuscany several decades ago, where so many British began buying second homes that it was given the nickname Chiantishire. As the values of country homes in Tuscany soared, the more adventurous wandered into nearby regions such as Umbria, and then farther south to the Marche and Abruzzo, buying up abandoned farmhouses or run-down villas. Puglia is the end of the line.

Port Royal is a charming community tucked into the marsh between Paris Island and Beaufort. It has an historic downtown like Beaufort, Bluffton and Savannah. Hilton Head doesn’t offer this, and it’s a flaw in their carefully-crafted design, in my opinion.

See more Port Royal on Flickr

One of our favorite restaurants in the area, Bateaux, recently relocated to historic Port Royal from Lady’s Island. Today, we ventured over to try Old Towne Coffehaus and McPhearson’s Serious BBQ, both of which were excellent.

We walked around a bit and saw lots of For Sale signs on homes and business properties. We also saw a new development going in, and evidence of others. Port Royal, like Bluffton, is being discovered. Marshfront living is alluring, there’s no doubt about that.

Before heading back to this side of the Broad we motored up to Boundary Street to find Higher Ground in its new location. Of course, my shoe radar went off and it brought me in direct contact with a pair of Keen’s in my size at 50% off retail. Who can resist a bargain?

Interestingly, there’s a new microbrewery in town in the next retail bay over from Higher Ground. Brewer’s Brewing Co. is a 7 bbl, 90 seat brewpub and claims to be a green operator. I ordered a Brickyard IPA and was impressed with the intense hop profile. Brewer’s says it’s one “for all you hop heads out there” and it is.

p.s. While drinking iced espresso at the Coffeehaus, I picked up the front page of today’s Charleston Post & Courier and smiled when I saw my friend Phil Sellers there. The paper is interested in his CityTrex startup, as well they should be.

This map shows that the population of New York City is equal to the population of four western states and Maine.

[via very small array]

[UPDATE] I also like these maps of Manhattan neighborhoods.

Chris Corrigan walks some pretty literary streets–the kind that don’t exist in strip malls.

A few months ago as I was walking in Government Street in Victoria I met a woman standing beneath a tree outside Munro’s Books. The tree had small pieces of paper attached to them and when I looked closer I saw that they were poems, hanging on a “poet tree.” The poet turned out to be Yvonne Blomer and she asked me if she could read me a poem. When I said, with delight, “of course!” she asked whether I preferred any particular subject. I replied that I wished her to read me a poem about the territory of the open heart. She looked at me for a second and then reached into a file folder and pulled out this one:

To watch over the vineyards

O carrion crow, pulpy skull of scarecrow

going soft in your black bill,

in this fetish-orange field lies worship:

the sweep of glossed plumage over glistening

membrane; lies the sweet blood of purple skinned grape

cut on your sharp edged tomia,

shimmering there; sun-light on wet earth.

You too sweet to ripe; you black in the shadows, calling when you’re calling - -

the herds fly in dust gone crow, gone scare,

gone trill in clicks and shouts of krrrkrrr.

It seems to me that poetry belongs outside, in the town square or on the street, like this. It’s a spoken form that doesn’t always translate well from the page, nor make the kind of impact it might otherwise.

“People seeing the beauty of this valley will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of its beauty.” -Chief Niwot

Bowl-der is the perfect place for testing the hypothesis that geography determines culture. Bowl-der is, geographically speaking, a bowl of a city nestled between a high Great Plains ridge to the east and the front range of the Rocky Mountains to the west. The bowl effect makes for an interesting stew of human interactivity.

Taking cues from the uniqueness of the land, the thoughts and actions of Bowl-der’s inhabitants are distinctly different from those who live in the surrounding geo-cultural reality. Denver is sprawl. Thus, its sense of place is scattered, which is the polar opposite of the unified feel found in Bowl-der. Despite the diversity of parts that go into its making, Bowl-der is capable of acting as one.

A nestling valley like this makes people feel at home, and one finds positivity and immense possibility in this safe zone. It’s possible to be for things–alternative energy, for instance–without feeling foolish. No scarlet letters are issued to idealists here.

The flipside to the goodness of the bowl is the fact that it is contained. Bowl-der is a microcosm, a world unto itself. While we need these hot spots of consciousness and kindness, we also need to spread the goodness found in a place like Bowl-der into everyday America.

Last year I made note of the cities where I spent at least one night. It’s a neat exercise in reflection.

Here’s the list for 2007.

• Austin
• Asheville
• Palm Coast
• Houston
• Atlanta
• Nashville
• Rochester, MN
• New York City
• Vancouver, BC
• Princess-owned floating city at sea
• Denali
• Wilderness lodge outside Talkeetna
• Anchorage
• Chapel Hill
• Myrtle Beach
• Cambridge
• Orlando
• Marco Island
• Memphis
• Winston-Salem
• Boulder

The Trident on West Pearl in Boulder is the great American coffee shop. The coffee is excellent and the conversation is even better. Intellectuals come down off the Hill and mingle with entrepreneurs, artists, vagabonds and canyon folk. It’s very much at the center of something, a confluence with different streams joining to make for a stronger river moving forward.

“I have no money with which to build the modern American campus, but if you’ll design the buildings, I’ll work night and day to raise the means.” -Dr. Ludd Spivey, President of Florida Southern College, appealing to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1938

Lakeland, Florida is an old school Florida town with lovely lakes, a vital downtown core and a private college with the largest single collection of Frank Lloyd Wright designed buildings anywhere in the world.

inside Annie Pfeiffer Chapel at Florida Southern

We arrived on campus the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving which meant that the visitor center was closed. However, the walking tour was all the more pleasant without students or crowds of any sort to distract from the main show. And what a show! FLW went all out in Lakeland and I kept thinking as we wandered around the former orange grove how nice it would be to spend four years on this campus, or longer if one were a faculty member or administrator.

Florida Southern is a private liberal arts school. They don’t have an architecture program. However, the school would do well to start one, or better yet a program in achitectural preservation and restoration. Given that many of the buildings were built in part by students working in return for tuition and board, there would something poetic about a new group of students engaged in preservation of this national treaure.

For more images from the campus, see my Flickr set.