We’ve begun purchase on a home. A Craftsman bungalow fixer-upper on a decent-size piece of land. And I’ve drafted my job talk amid the disruptions of a pandemic. Big changes ahead, but also “continuity of instruction.” Despite the pandemic, I remain oriented toward hope. “Social distancing” is necessary for the time being, but no need to be excessive about it. We’ll grill, we’ll cook, we’ll garden, we’ll grow. By these means, we build the Oikos of our dreams.
Tag: Housing
Wednesday February 26, 2020
Life appears as stories wrapped in stories, circles wrapped in circles, as on the rotating wheel of a volvelle, by means of which the times they are a-changin’. Sarah and I imagine transforming a fire station into a dream home, as did Robert Creeley and the Ghostbusters.
Friday February 14, 2020
Work load plus baby care plus seeking a home plus preparation for an interview and a job talk: it’s a lot. What is our dream home? Pool? Garden? Zendō? A base from which to launch on walks and dérives? A place into which one grows as a family. Space for growth. As I said: it’s a lot. All the same, I leave time in the evening for a walk beneath the stars. What will this house of ours look like? Will we know it when we see it? I have a large collection of books and records. The organizational models proposed by hippie moderns were loose and spontaneous — experience a kind of free play amid minimal “scripting.” The “tool freaks,” however, featured in the pages of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, focused instead on “personal computing” and videogaming, programming scaled to the person. The neoliberal order instantiated by these technologies decollectivized the body politic, reducing users to “islands in the net,” connected only by media mail and money. The housing market seems a bit like a game one must play once encircled by the system, ensnared in its webs of debt. Time to watch or at least save for later a six-part BBC series based on Brand’s book How Buildings Learn. Unless time is a thing better spent reading and sleeping — and it is, it is. There is a house out there that is right for us. Let us wait and walk and see.
Thursday February 13, 2020
A friend puts his house up for sale — a beautiful old craftsman, sizeable enough for a small family. We schedule a viewing and prepare ourselves in case we wish to make an offer. A bin full of discarded library architecture books turns up earlier in the day at Goodwill, including books from the 60s and 70s by Lawrence Halprin and Paolo Soleri.