neighbourliness or service interventions

Courtesy of Kottke’s Quick Links, I am pouring over this list of one hundred and one small civil- and civic-engineering hacks that one could apply to any community to improve it. Just a few select ideas that could be pitched to municipal-councils or could shame city governments into action:

66. Turn snow piles into sidewalk ice bars
79. Host a movie out-of-doors
98. Map your public produce—stray fruits and vegetables that go unharvested
13. Guerrilla gardening revolution
71. Become a tour guide and showcase your neighbourhood

What do you think? Was there one idea (or a hatful) that resonated with you that you will try? Surely all of us can try a little urban exploration, at minimum.

wintertuin ou hôtel particulier

Thanks to Messy Nessy Chic for piquing my curiosity with this divinely art nouveau glimpse of the Hôtel Hannon in Brussels, a Hôtel Particulier being a grand, detached townhouse in French. A wealth and successful petro-chemical engineer named Édouard Hannon in 1902 commissioned an architect friend to design him a home in the city. The house was transformed into a showcase for some of the finest art of the period, with fine frescos and mosaics, stained-glass from the Tiffany tradition and Émile Gallé, who contributed lamps, vases and other bric-a-brac. Tragically, the family only were able to reside there a couple of years and the mansion was left to decay, until having purchased the property, the borough opened house as a museum in 1989 after extensive restoration.

industrial arts

Back in 1935 surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp plied his craft in a purely commercial venture at the gadget fair Concours Lépine in Paris—a sort of invention-convention for debuting new household appliances—with his Rotoreliefs.
These kinetic works of art designed to rotate on a turntable and propagate optical illusions unfortunately missed the target audience at the fair, who were naturally more interested in the latest slicers and dicers than record albums that didn’t have any audio content. Duchamp was not disheartened by this entrepreneurial set-back and continued honing his trade in collaboration with other artists. Be sure to check out the whole curated article at Hyperallergic for more Rotoreliefs in action and short film Duchamp made with fellow surrealist Man Ray.

mindfulness

Robert Coleman Elementary of Baltimore, Maryland has replaced traditional discipline measures with after school meditative sessions. In the two years that this programme has been piloted in partnership with a local holistic healing centre, no students have been suspended or expelled, though one might venture that attendance at detention has grown.

sequin

Talented and prolific insect and arthropod photographer Nicky Bay shares a gallery of the unlikely Mirror Spider, native to the Australian continent. The lustery patches that cover their abdomens owe their character to the same biological compound that gives fish scales their shine, and as Bay documents, can grow or shrink in size or shift position to give the spider more camouflage, nearly disappearing behind the reflective surface entirely.  Discover more of his amazing work at the link above.

to autumn

Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer have o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinéd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

What are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy Music too—
While barréd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

~ John Keats, 1819

crucible or lacrymæ batavicæ

When one drips molten glass into a vessel of water, a little tadpole glass droplet forms that has some amazing physical properties. The bead can withstand blows from a hammer but if the tail is snipped, the whole droplet violently explodes. Previously known as Dutch tears (the Latin name above), there was a paucity of scientific investigation until they were reproduced and experimented on in the ducal court of Mecklenburg.
Prince Rupert gave British King Charles II an exciting demonstration and Prince Rupert Drops as they became known in England (called Bologneser Träne auf Deutsche—Baloney tears, however, owing to the reputation of the Italians as glassmakers) were taken up by the Royal Society for further studies in the mid seventeenth century. Though mostly taken up as a party-favour or a parlour-trick, volcanologists found the laboratory trials valuable as the drops approximated the pyroclastic forces found in eruptions and lava-flows, as did polymath Robert Hooke, whose puzzlement over the store of potential energy led to the development of the idea of elasticity, strain and compression and a scientific, predictable toolkit for ever more intricate mechanisms.

mare incognitum

Beforehand I had heard of how map-makers have historically staved-off others appropriating and copying their survey work by inserting made-up avenues (trap-streets) or frivolous features, knowing that if these decoys were present, their competitors were simply stealing from them.
I never knew that this geographic bait was sometimes preserved with intention and out of a sense of tribute and tradition, as was the case with Hy-Bra∫il (named after the home of the ancestors of one of Ireland’s legendary clans), a phantom island that drifted on charts between Ireland and North America over the course of nearly five centuries. Other spurious islands usually only survived one or two iterations of mapping, the false information quickly dispelled, but Hy-Bra∫il remained from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century in some form or another.  With Atlantis lost, perhaps in this Age of Exploration, navigators needed some immaterial goal to sustain them on their journeys—something elusive, which supposedly only emerged from the mists once every seven years and even when visible for that one fateful day, was forever just beyond the horizon. Maybe the Bermuda Triangle is heir to that tradition.