Hasta La Ideas

Hilarious excerpts, lists and essays from a budding American humorist

by John Ortved

What’s the worst icebreaker you can think of? Mike Sacks has some suggestions: “This party reminds me of 9/11;” “What’s your all-time favorite coupon?” or “They’re night-vision goggles, and no, I won’t be removing them.”

“Icebreakers to Avoid” is just one of dozens of hilarious lists, essays, emails and letters that make up Sacks’ new book, “Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason” from Tin House Books. Culled from previously published work in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, McSweeney’s and Esquire, as well as including new work, Sacks strikes blow after blow for the cause of humor.

Whether he’s reporting on the “Signs Your College is Not Very Prestigious” (they offer a minor in “Winning Radio Contests”), Sacks is unfailingly clever and precise in his satire.

His pieces have no goal but to make you laugh—and he achieves it over and over. The most succinct description of Your Wildest Dreams comes in the form of a blurb on the book’s cover, from none other than David Sedaris: “Mike Sacks is not just a sensational comic writer, but a sensational writer, period.” High praise and well deserved, it is available from Tin House’s online store and Amazon.

Coup de coeur sur le travail d’Olivier Ratsi, membre du label Antivj. Il compose et décompose des Anarchitectures en fragmentant la réalité de son environnement. Il interroge l’individu sur sa place au sein des ensembles urbains. Plus d’images dans la suite.

Previously on Fubiz

• Dust
• Luis Beltran
• Double Exposure Portraits

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ShelterBox, disaster relief in a box

As social, economic and ecological conditions continue to worsen and with the increasing sophistication and connectivity of information technology and social media, design for sustainability is now moving towards a new qualitatively different area of exploration: designing to build adaptive capacity. Its been almost 10 years since McDonough and Braungart’s ground-breaking book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things set the standard for sustainable design: toxic-free closed loop material cycles, use of renewable energy in manufacturing, post-consumer separation of biological and technical materials and service and flow takeback programs by manufacturers. [Ed Note: Don’t miss our recent Q+A with Braungart on Designing a New Material World.]

Emily Pilloton lays out design for sustainability 2.0 in her excellent introduction to her 2009 book Design Revolution. In “Design Can Change the World,” she brings social sustainability to the forefront by adding a human-centered, activist, user-friendly approach that expands the environmental focus from how we build things to the social question of what we should be building. Core77’s Allan Chochinov’s foreword to Design Revolution describes moving beyond good design to design for good, reinforcing the argument for design activism.

Similarly, recent projects like Ecovative Design’s EcoCradle—packaging material grown from fungi and agricultural byproducts and Open Ideo’s online multi-disciplinary platform for the collaborative design of social good—demonstrate the persistent power of Cradle to Cradle and design activism to inspire effective sustainable design. Designing to build adaptive capacity does not replace our current state of the art but adds a new layer of intention and concern that deepens our sustainability efforts and continues to reinterpret the role of designers in the sustainability movement.

DESIGNING FOR RESILIENCE

Designing to expand adaptive capacity means creating objects, templates and platforms that allow people and systems to survive and even thrive in a complex and uncertain planet. In a world increasingly shaped by peak oil, global warming, economic uncertainty and environmental disasters (Deep Water Horizon, Pakistani floods, Fukushima), designers are coming to grips with how to help users create local resilience and self-reliance. In fact, the concept of resilience has become an important term that designers are just now grappling with. An emergent property of systems that is related to the “longevity” tenet of sustainability but qualitatively different from its “no impact” focus, resilience is concerned with cycles of change and positive adaptation. Resilience thinking integrates social and environmental factors into a holistic framework that helps users prepare for —or even take advantage of—shocks to a system.

In their 2006 book Resilience Thinking, Brian Walker and David Salt explain the concept of the four phases of the adaptive cycle: rapid growth, conservation, release and reorganization. They argue that building adaptive capacity based on resilience, not optimal efficiency, allows systems to absorb and prepare for external disturbances without crossing thresholds that shift to another regime. Designers need to consider differentiated, integrated strategies for change rather than rational, efficient strategies that maximize and exploit the growth of early stages. These growth-focused systems certainly yield more substantial paybacks but at the expense of resilience, such that they are more prone to massive shakeups after significant fluctuations. As Salt and Walker explain, “any proposal for sustainable development that does not acknowledge a system’s resilience is simply not going to keep delivering goods and services. The key to sustainability lies in enhancing the resilience of social-ecological systems, not in optimizing isolated components of the system.”

(more…)

Here are some photos of the completed 2012 London Olympic Stadium designed by HOK Sport (now known as Populous).

Construction was completed this week and the 80,000-seat stadium will now be prepared with a running track, scoreboards and gantries before a test event in May next year.

According to the Olympic Delivery Authority construction is complete three months ahead of schedule and cost £10 million less that the original estimate.

The design was unveiled in 2007 – see our story here.

More about 2012 London Olympic Games »
More buildings for sport »

Photographs are by Morley von Sternberg, courtesy Populous.

Here’s a tiny bit of text from Populous:

29th March 2011 marks the completion of the construction contract at the Olympic Stadium where the last piece of turf is being laid by ODA Chairman John Armitt.

Rod Sheard, Senior Principal at Populous, the Stadium architect said: “The construction of the world’s most environmentally friendly Olympic Stadium has taken just over 1,000 days, in the world of major construction it could be considered a sprint, its completion marks the beginning of the end of the construction phase of London’s Olympic Games. We can now all look forward to just under 500 days of the final preparation to when the world will see this innovative design perform for the first time.”

Above image is courtesy ODA

See also:

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London 2012 Velodrome by Hopkins Architects	London Gate by Donis	Wenlock and Mandeville by iris

Mi ha portato subito alla mente il Kid Onion (scusate deviazione professionale) ma questo lampadario squamato disegnato da Benjamin Hubert mi piace proprio. Lo vedremo esposto durante questo salone del mobile per Fabbian.
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