Author: Mr. Homegrown

Saturday Tweets: A Big Excuse to Post Cats with Mustaches

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Saturday Linkages
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Irving Gill: the Greatest Architect You’ve Never Heard Of

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Design
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Last week I met up with a friend in San Diego, where I lived for ten years in the 1990s. I took a long walk between downtown and the neighborhood where Kelly and I shared an apartment, Hillcrest (home, incidentally, of the world’s greatest dive bar, Nunu’s). Along the way I kept spotting houses and apartments designed by the less-famous-than he-should-be early 20th century architect Irving Gill.

In the first decade of the 20th century, Gustav Stickley promoted Gill in the pages of the Craftsman Magazine. But many of Gill’s buildings fell prey to the rapacious and indiscriminate mid-twentieth century wrecking ball and he fell into obscurity.

He’s often thought of as a kind of proto-modernist but I’m not so sure. His buildings also have a neo-primitive quality, like a mashup of adobe missions, vernacular Greek architecture and a de Chirico painting. More than any other architect I know he understood the Mediterranean climate of Southern California and designed buildings appropriate to the climate.

I don’t know why we don’t have more courtyards like this one designed by Gill.

He pioneered concrete tilt-up construction and was a master of the multi-unit bungalow court.

Most of all I think he understood form and proportion. That’s how you can spot his elegant buildings.

If one were to write the Southern California version of William Morris’ News From Nowhere, I think our local road not taken utopia would have been built by Gill.

The Amazing Online Building Technology Heritage Library

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Design
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Are you an old house nerd? Do you enjoy old building material catalogs? Get ready to cancel Netflix.

The geniuses at the Association of Preservation Technology (APT) have teamed up with Internet Archive to digitize 9,500 pre-1965 construction and building technology documents for your perusal via the Building Technology Heritage Library.

Enjoy strange Murphy bed contraptions? They’ve got you covered:

Tiny Hawaiian kit homes:

Vintage seed catalogs:

Fans:

Fuddy-duddy 1920s home furnishings:

1960s lamps:

And a few bad ideas:

In case you’re wondering, Jim Brown’s boyhood dream was to build giant factories to manufacture livestock fencing.

But seriously, there’s a lot of useful information here for preservationists, graphic designers and anyone interested in how things used to be built.

What to Do With Junk Mail and Shredded Paper

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Domesticus
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Image: Max Pixel.

Perhaps obsessing over reducing junk mail while simultaneously generating a metric freak-ton of construction debris is a bit of a pathological redirection, but I’m really tired of the daily chore of transferring the mail straight to the recycling. I’ve thought about asking our nice mail person to just drop the mail straight into the blue bin, but that would insult her noble profession.

Recycling junk mail may not even do much good. Recycling is dirty, complicated and, at least in part, just a ruse to make us all feel less guilty about shopping. Listen to our two part interview with Kreigh Hampel, recycling coordinator for the city of Burbank if you’d like to get the lowdown on what it’s like on the receiving end of all our garbage (Part 1, Part 2). And the possibility of a trade ware with China may make things even more complicated. China no longer wants our trash.

So what to do about reducing paper waste at the source aside from the obvious (sign up for paperless bills). The Data & Marketing Association will grant you the privilege of not getting receiving their trashy mailings for a $2 fee. Thank you Adam Smith! Thankfully you can remove deceased relatives from their database for free. Just don’t try to fake your own junk mail death as the DMA, apparently, checks. To opt out of credit card applications head here.

And what to do with all that shredded paper? We’ve had both our mail and credit card numbers stolen so I have to shred a considerable amount of paper every month. Shredded paper is a big problem for recyclers and a trade war will only make it worse.

Assuming you’ve done your best to stop incoming junk mail, what can you do with the stuff that still clogs the mail box? I have a very short list:

Junk Mail

Shredded Paper

I’ve also been pondering the possibility of making lumber with junk mail and/or shredded paper bound together with resin. I’m not the only person who’s had this idea but, unfortunately, it involves plastics which I don’t like to work with if at all possible.

If you know of a good way to stop junk mail or re-use paper please leave a comment!

Saturday Tweets: Rats, DIY Plastic Recycling and Old Flatbread

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Saturday Linkages
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