Now here’s some carpentry!

Friday I did a slide show on Tiny Homes on the Move at the Napa Bookmine bookstore. A great bookstore, a wonderful crowd, all of us on the same page. Made me think of Sam Cooke saying to the audience on his “Live at Harlem Square” album, “I can see you’re with me tonight.”

Rapport has been wonderful lately. 45 years of doing these building books; there’s a thread through these books and people who’ve read them. A tribe of us interested in a certain kind of shelter, warm, inviting, full of life, the antithesis of the Dwell magazine aesthetic.

“…all rooms ought to look as if they were lived in, and to have, so to say, a friendly welcome for the incomer.”

-William Morris

And working with our own hands.

Shot a lot of photos of mostly small homes in Napa. After dinner, store owners Naomi and Eric and I and a bunch of their friends headed up into the hills and had a marvelous meal prepared by master chef (and carpenter and musician) Steve Hutchinson. Wine flowed, 2 of the guys worked for wineries, it was a real treat. After everyone left, Steve and I got in the hot tub, yes, with glasses of wine, yes a hot tub in Napa, snark away, Californians in their hot tubs, etc. It started to rain — hard — and here we were at 2200 feet on a mountain, in hot water in the pouring-down rain.

“Skateistan, an innovative NGO in Kabul founded to empower Afghan children (and especially young girls), teaches children to skateboard as a gateway to get them more involved in education. In a tribute to these children’s struggles, UK-based photographer Jessica Fulford-Dobson created a photo series portraying the girls learning to skateboard at the NGO’s branch in Kabul (it has since spread to Cambodia and South Africa).

In many Afghan communities, it is customary to forbid women from riding bicycles. Skateboarding, then, becomes an empowering activity that gives these girls a source of physical exercise, empowerment, and some plain and simple fun.”

Sent in by Anonymous

https://www.boredpanda.com/skateistan-skateboarding-girls-afghanistan-jessica-fulford-dobson/

By Anagram Architects. This is an office building for the South Asian Human Rights Documentation Center, a non-governmental rights organization in New Dehli.

“The office for SAHRDC was designed on a 50sqm corner plot.

Single consolidated volumes were created on each floor, and flexibly partitioned.

Each volume is serviced by a buffer bay which shields internal work spaces and is composed of a cantilevered staircase and toilet stack. The porosity of the external wall ensures that this bay is well ventilated. A single repeating brick module creates a visually complex pattern reminiscent of traditional South Asian brise-soleil.

It was crucial for the façade to converse with the bustle on the street, whilst being fortified. The porosity of the wall, thus, maintains a degree of privacy while playfully engaging with the street corner.”

https://anagramarchitects.com/?arc_project=sahrdc-2