This is our seventh day in London. It’s an exciting place, especially compared to California. People are extremely kind, often offering help with directions. When we came up out of the tube (subway) on the way to the hotel, we got to a long flight of stairs, and when I started struggling to wheel my (50 lbs or so) bag up the stairs, a guy rushed up, picked it up and walked with me to the top. Dude!

A lot of the time I feel bewildered, a somewhat-country boy in fast-moving urbanism. But there are moments of sheer thrill, the excitement of things different. The first day here, I went to the basement bookstore of the Architectural Association (a trendy school of architecture) on Bedford Square, and found a wonderful selection of books. I discovered the German publisher Burkehäuser, which has a list of maybe 100 books in English. I’m going to buy three of them: Building with Earth, by Gernot Minke; Sustainable Design by Control and Review; and Building Integrated Photovoltaics.

We’ve got one week “Oyster” passes, which allow free usage of the tube and buses and they work great. Otherwise, the tube is about seven dollars a pop. Cabs are ultra-expensive. In fact this is the priciest place I’ve ever been, but you get a lot for yr. money. Food ranges from pretty good to great. Buildings, at least in this part of town, are mostly immaculate. The masonry has been cleaned of city soot, I would guess power-washed, so you see lots of magnificent design and craftsmanship.

By coincidence, our son Will and his bride Aine are here on their honeymoon, and were meeting them this afternoon to take a trip on the Thames and then walk down the south side of the river to London Bridge, to Tate Modern, Saint Paul’s, walk on the Millennium Bridge. Tomorrow the four of us will explore the city, and the next day Lesley and I are flying Ryanair to Cork, Ireland, where will pick up a small Volkswagen rental car and explore the West Coast of Ireland.

Stewart Brand has just come out with a new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto: which sounds like it may be his second major statement, the first being the Whole Earth Catalog. Let’s see what Stewart’s concluded after lo, these 40 years: https://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/

“You follow the feeling of the piece,” Ganson explained, “and then wrestle it into physicality.” As long as the idea is nonphysical, it is permanent; it becomes temporary as a physical device; and then it becomes permanent again in the mind of the viewer.

As Ganson spoke, a tiny chair walked meditatively around and around on a rock on the right side of the stage, projected live onto a video screen. (Thinking Chair.) No part in any of his kinetic art pieces is superfluous, he pointed out; everything functions. The piece should be crystal clear and also completely ambiguous. That’s what allows each viewer to create their own story.

He showed a video of “Machine with Concrete.” On the left an electric motor drives a worm gear at 212 revolutions a minute. A sequence of twelve 50-to-1 gear reductions slows the rotation so far that the last gear, on the right, is set in concrete. It would take over two trillion years for that gear to rotate. “Intense activity on one end, quiet stillness on the other,” Ganson said. “It’s a duality I feel in my own being.”

The next video, “Cory’s Yellow Chair,” showed a chair exploding into six pieces, which hover at a distance, then gently reassemble, and instantly explode again. Ganson said he wanted the chair pieces to explode at infinite speed, rest in stillness at the extreme, then reassemble gradually. The piece is stab at the question of “when is now?” Now is when the chair coalesces, but it doesn’t last.

Some of Ganson’s machines inspire people to sit and watch them for hours. “Machine With Oil” does nothing but drench itself with lubrication all day long. In “Margot’s Other Cat” a soaring chair is set in random motion by an unsuspecting cat. The cat’s motion is utterly determined; the chair has its own life.

During the Q&A, Alexander Rose asked the full-house audience how many of them of were makers of things. Ninety percent raised their hands in joy.

This structure was an award winner in a design contest at the Architectural Association, a London college of architecture and is on display outside the school, on Bedford Square. It consists of 28 layers of very thin plywood, which conceal an internal structural system