“There’s nothing like eating your own home- grown vegies, and there are heaps of different foods that will re- grow from the scrap pieces that you’d normally throw out or put into your compost bin. It’s fun. And very simple … if you know how to do it.”
In a world increasingly challenged by both man-made and natural disasters, the Shelter has been designed as a sustainable housing prototype that can be configured to suit almost any climate or orientation and can be readily and cheaply transported to diverse and remote locations around the globe.
Arriving flat-packed, the Shelter can be assembled quickly and has the potential to make a significant difference when applied to a range of medium to long-term housing solutions, it could also provide immediate solutions to industry as it moves to frontier locations. Most importantly, by providing refuge and security for families and communities in crisis, the Shelter can give back to societies in need everywhere.
Beyond emergency relief, the Shelter is known as Pavilion, a flexible module of space that could be used as a holiday house, a remote research laboratory, even mining accommodation; whatever can be conceived of in 37.5 sqm.
Located on the east coast of Great Barrier Island – a black rough sawn timber box sits looking north to the sea.
The dark exterior palette is completed with a layer of perforated metal screens. This operable layer allows the moderation of light / air and protection both when occupied and alone. Internally walls and floors are clad with oiled oak boards that provide a warm counter to its robust exterior.
The programme provides for a pair of symmetrical bedrooms and ensuites set about a central living space. Care has been made to limit the scale of the building and maintain a sense of ‘cottage’. The building is off the grid, powered by solar panels independent systems for water collection and treatment.
This is a retreat that provides shelter, warmth and comfort to engage with the wilderness and isolation of the remote setting.
The only person of color to score a win at last night’s Golden Globe Awards was probably also the biggest upset: Don Cheadle won Best Actor in a Comedy Series for his starring turn in House Of Lies, over nominees from the likes of 30 Rock, The Big Bang Theory and critical darling Louis C.K., among others.
He also handled the awkward task of following Quentin Tarantino’s in addressing the press corps backstage, in which Tarantino dropped an N-bomb to defend it appearing so much in Django Unchained, which netted him the Best Screenplay (Motion Picture) award.
Buffalo Chicken Pull-Apart Bread Print
Prep time
40 mins
Cook time
40 mins
Total time
1 hour 20 mins Buffalo Chicken Pull Apart Bread will put any other loaf to shame at your Super Bowl party!
Author: Morgan
Recipe type: Bread
Ingredients
3 tubes Pillsbury Recipe Creations Seamless Dough
1½ cups Crock Pot Buffalo Chicken (click to open recipe in a new tab)
½ cup colby-jack cheese, shredded
⅓ cup scallions, chopped
Nonstick cooking spray
Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Unroll each tube of Pillsbury dough and cut each into 8 even rectangles (slicing once lengthwise and three times along the width).
Using a spoon, spread a thin layer the Crock Pot Buffalo Chicken on each rectangle. Don’t overdo it, or the bread will not cook on the inside.
Sprinkle each rectangle with cheese and scallions.
Use a spatula to stack the rectangles in fours.
Spray a mini loaf pan with nonstick cooking spray and prop it up vertically by placing something behind it. I used a can of soup.
Stack all of the buffalo chicken rectangles into your baking dish. Push down lightly on the tops of the stacks as you add more.
Sit the pan horizontally (the way it should be, normally) and sprinkle with extra cheese and scallions, if you’d like.
Bake in the oven for about 40 minutes, or until top begins to brown.
Let cool for 20 minutes in the pan before removing and serving.
Notes Start the Crock Pot Buffalo Chicken about a day ahead of time.
“No prosecution of war criminals, torturers and mass murderers; no prosecution of those that declare a war on false pretense; no prosecution of those that indulge in grand larceny and financial fraud, immiserating the lives of many; no prosecuting of the rich and the powerful; but over-zealous hounding of a young, idealistic, brilliant man whose only crime seemed to be the desire to make available accumulated knowledge to all; and as always, the continuing incarceration and punishment of the nation’s dispossessed and underprivileged. This is not the justice system we would like to have, it is the one we actually have. What could have motivated the prosecutor run amuck, Carmen Ortiz, to seek the horrendously disproportionate jail sentences and fines she sought for Aaron Swartz? Political ambition, perhaps. But focusing on her actions alone would be a mistake. Ortiz took the line she did because she was well aware that she was acting in a very particular context, a time and place in which the penalties she sought stood some chance of being viewed as the appropriate punishment for a baleful malefactor. Ortiz, you see, was well aware that she lives in a world densely populated by confused, ignorant people, incapable of understanding the legal, economic and utilitarian roots of private property, or the differences between physical property and intangible property, who are too lazy to bother disentangling the idiotic term ‘intellectual property’, who faithfully parrot the lying press releases of media corporations, who cannot be bothered to understand how the creation and propagation of ideas works. These people can be relied upon to childishly shriek and scream at every instance of an action that threatens to upend the neat little black and white world they have constructed of absolute property rights and romantic notions of creativity. They can be relied upon to deploy, with little prompting, an emotionally charged, morally inflected language of ‘theft’, ‘piracy’, ‘robbery’, and ‘stealing’ to describe actions whose descriptions call for considerably more nuance. They are firm and upstanding and self-righteous, full of rectitude and judgment; they imagine themselves defenders of the starving artist and the inventor in the basement, not realizing they are, as usual, corporate shills and defenders of the antitheses of their proclaimed stances. They clog our bulletin boards and blog comments spaces, whining about how ‘artists deserve to be paid’, about how books and poems will never get written, how movies will never be made, music will never be composed, songs will never be performed in a world that does not offer as much copyright protection as possible, from the cradle to the grave and beyond. These howling fools–who include those who work at supposedly elite institutions of learning–had set up a chorus, an applause track that Ortiz craved. Her cruel, over-the-top, inquisitorial sentence of thirty-five years and a million dollars, one would that terminate the career of a man who packed more creativity into his little pinkie than all the hordes who claim to be the faithful defenders of creativity, would ensure her hosannahs from this gallery. She would be enshrined as the Grand Protector of Property. Could there be a higher honor in our society? So she acted. And pushed Aaron Swartz into his grave.”
“The television series ‘24’ has been a television phenomenon which over seven series has spawned a mass following and innumerable spin-offs including webisodes, prequels, games, and action figures. More significantly it has been enormously influential in the construction of the relationship between rule of law and security issues, particularly in relation to terrorism. Jack Bauer’s actions, and specifically his use of torture in the common good, have been important influences in the development of the US debate. Nonetheless, to situate ‘24’ as a purely contemporary phenomenon – a child of 9/11 – is to miss the larger point. On the one hand ‘24’ frames law against questions of singularity which appeal to a longstanding tradition of vigilante justice evident in familiar archetypes of cowboys and superheroes. At the same time such a tradition reaches back to much older Christological models of justice and subjectivity which modernism has deflected but never defeated. In ‘24’ and elsewhere, popular culture does not merely keep these memories of law alive: it actively realizes and advances them, and needs to be understood not only as a depiction of law but as a law-making force in its own right. A pluralist theory of law ties contemporary technological manifestations of popular culture back to law’s enduring social and discursive roots as we see, for example, in EP Thompson’s Cultures in Common. One might even characterize popular culture as a defence of some sort of ‘moral legality’ against the ‘market legality’ of modernity. On the other hand, ‘24’ frames law against questions of urgency and emotion. While popular culture has for centuries reflected an older form of law and justice, its capacity to undermine the very pluralist and discursive openness which are its well-spring, demonstrates the dangers to which the rhetoric of urgency and the emotional power of medium and message are prone. In a world shorn of its faith in the traditional structures which sustained the moral economy and the moral legality, the appeal to simply trust in an inarticulable justice sustained by an emotional pitch which is in ‘24’ at every moment apparent, opens the prospect of legal terrorism.”
Built atop a formerly contaminated industrial site, Tanner Springs Park is considered "an experiment in sustainable park design and management." This innovative park is located in the Pearl District of northwest Portland, an area that was once a wetland and a lake. As the population grew in the late 19th century, however, the wetland and lake were filled in, Tanner Creek was rerouted through underground pipes and the land built over with warehouses and residences. Today, the design of Tanner Springs Park represents a desire to reconnect Portland with its ecological history; the park sits about 20 feet above the former lake surface.
Initial planning efforts for the Pearl District in the 1990s included early plans for a network of open spaces. After the opening of Jamison Square, which was the first of the open spaces to be developed, the planning for Tanner Springs Park began in early 2003. Atelier Dreiseitl, a renowned German design firm, and GreenWorks, P.C., an award-winning, local landscape architecture firm, were selected to design the park in conjunction with community involvement.
Site Plan. Image Credit: greenbuildingbrain.org
The final design reconnects the neighborhood with the pre-industrial wetlands, not only by recreating the historical landscapes, but by showcasing the closed-loop water system as well. Sloping downwards from west to east, the west end of the park starts with an Oak savannah prairie followed by a native grassland, the wetland, and finally a pond at the eastern end.
From the park sign:
"All the rainwater that falls within the curb-line of the park is collected and treated within the park--a first for a Portland park. Rather than channeling the stormwater to storm drains in the street, all of it is filtered within the park. an ultra violet light system is used, as well as natural soil filtration as the water runs "downstream" through the runnels. No chemicals are used to treat the water in this closed system."
A Rainwater Pavilion was also added to channel captured rainwater back into the park's pond and streams.
Tanner Springs Park should also be noted for its strong representation of Portland's prior industrial landscape through the use of various materials. The signature art installation at the east end of the park consists of a sloped and staggered wall of 99 vertical rail tracks, used in the 19th century Portland rail yards. This wall of rusting reddish brown rail tracks are interspersed with blue stained glass panels with images of insects--"a merging of man-made and natural references." The basalt Belgian blocks that pave the park walkways are historically significant as well. The material originally served as ballast on ships traveling up the Columbia River and later cobbled the streets of Portland.
Fun Fact: Tanner Springs Park was featured as 'Lipsy Park' in an episode of Portlandia, a satirical television series set in Portland, OR.
About the Journey:
Hi! My name is Lucy Wang and I'm a recent landscape architecture grad from the University of Maryland. I'm currently traveling the U.S. (and parts of Canada) by public transportation for the next several months in search of great, publicly-accessible landscape architecture sites, as well as landscape architecture firms and universities. I'll be sharing some of my favorite finds on Land8 along the way. For more information, check out my profile. As always, feel free to leave a comment below!
The British Library has not only put online its fantastic Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts , it has also effectively put them in the Public Domain, even though they are technically still in copyright in the UK until 2040. There are obviously lots of marvellous images there - in fact 35,661 of them from 4,231 different manuscripts - but with shuddering predictability we've focused on the search term 'shed'. Pictured above and below are a couple of results from Petrus de Crescentiis's Ruralia commoda in a French translation attributed to Jean Corbechon, dating from the Netherlands in the late 15th century. Above is a man winnowing wheat, below the author in an orchard (might he have shedworked in that shed?).
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Back in September I wrote about sinningia, an African violet relative with an unusual tuber that grows above the soil. At the time my plant was in full bloom. It is now going into dormancy and has been losing leaves. The photo above is what it looked like yesterday in its current home underneath lights in my basement. [Please note that the leaves are green. They look yellowy/red because of the back light coming from fluorescents.] I was prompted to write about the plant because I received an email this week from Tim Tuttle, the person who created the hybrid I am growing, ‘Kevin Garnet.’ A few of you asked if the plant was named for the pro basketball player… More
[There is a] rather widespread belief that thinking must interfere with doing. … [But] both ordinary people and professional practitioners often think about what they are doing, sometimes even while doing it. –Donald Schön
Garden ponds have been popular for some time. This past summer however, I was amazed to see how many homeowners had decided to devote almost their entire backyard to a pond.
I am going to show you just a couple of examples, but I saw more than a few of these large scale water features in 2012.
Hamilton, Ontario. Pond by Clearwater Pond I am not sure my picture gives you an accurate enough sense of the sheer expanse of this pond. Trust me, it was enormous! Save for a small deck that framed the pond like a crescent moon, this sizeable suburban plot was almost entirely under water. A flagstone path leads to a gazebo at one corner of the property. A gang plank leads from the gazebo out to a tiny island near the center of the pond. Here is second example: Georgetown, Ontario. Pond also by Clearwater Ponds. This is the view looking down from the upper deck of the home into the backyard. A series of streams and waterfalls feed a large pond located just off the back deck. Waterfall detail Looking back at the house. The view at ground level. Talking with the homeowners, I think it was the sense of being at the cottage, without the long commute, that made them want to devote so much of their property to a pond. The sound of water tumbling down a waterfall also has a pleasant way of drowning out the local traffic noises.
The backyard becomes a place of private retreat and a sanctuary from their busy lives.
Darting fish... The summer serenade of mating frogs... and beautiful waterlilies. I can see the appeal of these large backyard ponds. Flowers, trees and shrubs are incorporated, but they take on more of a supporting role. So what do you think? Could you ever see having a large water feature like this in your backyard? My time is short today and so I will put up the name of the winners for the book draws on Sunday.
A Cartoonish, Funky Art Shed/Shack/Guest House by Derek 'Deek" Diedricksen
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Sunday posts are sponsored by Garden Spaces, suppliers of contemporary garden buildings, offices, gyms and studios, many of which do not require planning
So, without looking at the title, what do you think this is? A weapon? A tool? Perhaps both? It’s a small bottle opener, and one with a hexagonal opening and faceted polygonal silhouette at that. Designed by Bec Brittain (she has worked with Lindsey Adelman, who you’ve heard of by now, and has her own excellent lighting designs). For an extra $5, Ms. Brittain will add a monogram with up to 7 characters, including any combination of letters, numbers, a period, and a heart. Talk about an excellent gift for anyone with an appreciation of geometry- it’s a no brainer.
Materials: Water-jet cut, hand-polished brass.
Measurements: Approximately 3.5″ x 2″
Built in 1937 for a family's summer getaways, this cabin originally had just one bedroom, one bathroom and 960 square feet to its name. The current homeowners loved the rustic ambience but wanted an open space that would take full advantage of the creek and forest views. The couple hired architect
Positive greetings from essential Sierra Leonean sight-impaired super-group Blind Musical Flames. Welcome to 2013. We're starting light for now here at Awesome Tapes From Africa, deeper heavies to come. Hope you like simple pleasures, some dancing and a little bit of reggae.
Among the scholarly chapters in the book is my modest contribution, “Parceiros em surdina.” The English version of this chapter, titled “Milhaud’s silent partners,” may be read on my website as part of the Boeuf Chronicles series.
At the age of 14, Swartz played a key role in developing the RSS software that is still widely used to enable people to manage what they read on the internet. As a teenager, he also played a vital role in the creation of Reddit, the wildly popular social networking news site. When Conde Nast purchased Reddit, Swartz received a substantial sum of money at a very young age. He became something of a legend in the internet and programming world before he was 18. His path to internet mogul status and the great riches it entails was clear, easy and virtually guaranteed: a path which so many other young internet entrepreneurs have found irresistible, monomaniacally devoting themselves to making more and more money long after they have more than they could ever hope to spend.
But rather obviously, Swartz had little interest in devoting his life to his own material enrichment, despite how easy it would have been for him. As Lessig wrote: "Aaron had literally done nothing in his life 'to make money' . . . Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good."
Specifically, he committed himself to the causes in which he so passionately believed: internet freedom, civil liberties, making information and knowledge as available as possible. Here he is in his May, 2012 keynote address at the Freedom To Connect conference discussing the role he played in stopping SOPA, the movie-industry-demanded legislation that would have vested the government with dangerous censorship powers over the internet.
Critically, Swartz didn't commit himself to these causes merely by talking about them or advocating for them. He repeatedly sacrificed his own interests, even his liberty, in order to defend these values and challenge and subvert the most powerful factions that were their enemies. That's what makes him, in my view, so consummately heroic.
In 2008, Swartz targeted Pacer, the online service that provides access to court documents for a per-page fee. What offended Swartz and others was that people were forced to pay for access to public court documents that were created at public expense. Along with a friend, Swartz created a program to download millions of those documents and then, as Doctorow wrote, "spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain." For that act of civil disobedience, he was investigated and harassed by the FBI, but never charged.
“On Friday, a highly educated, very smart colleague at The New Yorker explained her decision to remain unvaccinated with these words: “I never get a flu shot, and I never get the flu.” O.K. Let’s play her game. Turn to whomever you are with and say these sentences out loud: “I never wear seat belts, and I never get killed in car crashes;” “I never use condoms, and I never become infected with sexually transmitted diseases;” “I eat red meat seven times a week, only exercise once a year, and I’ve never had a heart attack or a stroke.””
Wednesday posts are sponsored by The Stable Company®, the UK's premier supplier of garden offices and garden rooms. Click here
Wednesday posts are sponsored by The Stable Company®, the UK's premier supplier of garden offices and garden rooms. Click here
L'autre monastère arménien qui fait rêver, c'est celui de Noravank.
L'autre monastère arménien qui fait rêver, c'est celui de Noravank.
Hamilton, Ontario. Pond by Clearwater Pond 
A flagstone path leads to a gazebo at one corner of the property. A gang plank leads from the gazebo out to a tiny island near the center of the pond. 
Georgetown, Ontario. Pond also by Clearwater Ponds. 
Waterfall detail 
Looking back at the house. 
The view at ground level. 
Flowers, trees and shrubs are incorporated, but they take on more of a supporting role. 
A flagstone path leads to a gazebo at one corner of the property. A gang plank leads from the gazebo out to a tiny island near the center of the pond. 
Georgetown, Ontario. Pond also by Clearwater Ponds. 
Looking back at the house. 
The view at ground level. 
Flowers, trees and shrubs are incorporated, but they take on more of a supporting role. 
Sunday posts are sponsored by Garden Spaces, suppliers of contemporary garden buildings, offices, gyms and studios, many of which do not require planning
Sunday posts are sponsored by Garden Spaces, suppliers of contemporary garden buildings, offices, gyms and studios, many of which do not require planning
These white/wood speakers from Finnish maker Gradient/model 5 sounded full and detailed with a clean Scandinavian look. More
