Modern life

SLUM CADILLACS

Back in 1978 I took part in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Jamboree. The deal was you could speak about any subject you wanted, but for no more than 5 minutes. Here is what I said.

I’d like to talk to you today about slum Cadillacs and technological incongruity. In the 50s it was quite fashionable to study slums and the people who lived in them. One of the startling facts that came out of those studies was that a lot of poor people drive Cadillacs. What’s interesting is the kind of reaction that people gave to this fact.

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BACK TO THE FUTURE

A friend asked me what I thought of the design of the recently unveiled Tesla Cybercab. The BBC website called the car “futuristic-looking,” perhaps because it has a sleek body and gull-wing doors. The latter are better described as “backward-looking,” since they were first introduced by Mercedes-Benz 70 years ago, and had a brief—very brief—revival in the 1981 De Lorean. I haven’t seen a Cybercab, only photographs, but the question made me think of EV car design in general. It strikes me that the “problems” that EV design is solving often remain murky. The unpleasantly delicate door handles of Teslas,

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A WRITING LIFE: PART THREE

In 2004 I got a call from Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate. Would I be its architecture critic? Sixteen years earlier I had written a column for Wigwag, a short-lived general interest magazine that had been done in by the 1991 recession. But I was now 61, which seemed a bit old for an online magazine that appeared to be staffed by twenty somethings. I told Jacob that if I accepted I was not interested in simply reviewing new buildings. He said that was fine with him. Over the next six years I wrote 133 essays and slide shows.

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A WRITING LIFE: PART TWO

In 1989, three books later, I wrote The Most Beautiful House in the World, about how my wife Shirley and I built our own house in rural Quebec. The book was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and made it to the bestseller list. Later that year I got a call from a Times editor who invited me to write something on architecture for the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday paper. I was taken aback because although I was an architect, I had written articles and book reviews on other subjects,

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A WRITING LIFE: PART ONE

In the 1970s I belonged to the Minimum Cost Housing Group at McGill University in Montreal. Our research included third world slums, alternative technology, composting toilets, well, that was the seventies. We published and sold booklets—Stop the Five Gallon Flush was the most successful. Around 1978 I thought it would be a good idea to combine all the publications in a book—after all, this was the era of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Domebook. I didn’t have much success finding a trade publisher. I did get one positive response from Bill Strachan,

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WRITING

In a spirited talk at Purdue University, the noted biographer Stacy Schiff was asked what advice she might give to aspiring writers. “Your only job is to make the reader turn the page,” was one of her answers. Pithy, and true. Years and years ago, before she became a famous biographer, Stacy was an assistant editor at Viking, my editor when I was writing Home. Later, when I was setting out to write a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted I too asked her for advice. “You need to learn everything about your subject,” she counseled,

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WITHOUT SHIRLEY

It is the third year of my life without Shirley. The period of intense grief has passed, but with it also the immediacy of her absence. I still talk to her, and I still occasionally get the feeling that she will knock on my door, like a character in a Hollywood paranormal movie. I would tell her about what she’s missed: the time the Schuylkill breached its banks and our building got flooded; my visit two summers ago to Northeast Harbor in Maine, where we once spent a happy week; my last book, my next book. In truth, there is not much to relate.

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STREAMING

Wally Byam (1896-1962) built the first Airstream trailer in 1937 (it cost $795). He was trained as a lawyer but had a checkered career. In the 1930s there was a fad for travel trailers, and he tried that. The Airsteam was monocoque construction, streamlined and very light. Although the exterior looked like a Dymaxion car or an airship, there was no bare aluminum inside—wood paneling, over-stuffed seats, pretty curtains. Lots of plaid. Starting in 1951, Byam led “caravans,” groups of up to 200 Airstream owners, touring the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. The last caravan was from Capetown to Cairo! At night the Airstreams formed large circles, … Read more