October 8th, 2018
David Stairs
Economic growth is one of those hot-button issues politicians are always promising to support. In fact, almost the surest way to a failed career in politics is to preside over an economic downturn.
This land in NE Portland won’t be empty for long
Cities on America’s west coast are currently participating in the economic boom of many regions bordering on the Pacific rim, with its fluid flows of cash back and forth across the pond. One of the topics of conversation among people in San Francisco and Portland is the high cost of rents and real estate in general. In the early ’80s I rented a two-bedroom flat in San Francisco’s Mission district for $475/month. With rental rooms now going for $1800 apiece, and apartments at $3200 per month, I’m feeling like a vestige from the Dark Ages.
There aren’t enough parking spots on NE Thompson Street since not every home has a driveway
But developers plan to replace these corner structures with a 90 unit complex and 40 parking places
My children reside in the Boise-Elliot neighborhood of Portland, just north of the Rose Quarter where the Blazers play. In this neighborhood, developers definitely seem to be in the drivers’ seat. Parking on NE Thompson Street is crowded already since not every home comes equipped with a driveway. Now it seems developers have purchased the land at the west end of the street that used to house city social services, and are planning to erect 90 condo units but only provide parking for 40. Apparently, the notion is that many of these new residents will either bike or utilize public transit. But locals are not convinced. The neighborhood association is rallying residents in an effort to either block construction, or demand the city require a realistic parking plan.
In 2014 these burned properties were for sale…
…Now they’re a large apartment complex
The inroads of encroaching condos are everywhere to be found. Four years ago I reported that side-by-side houses on a nearby street had burned in a fire. Today their former lot is the site of a large condo project. Replacing two-story single-family frame houses with four and five story 100 unit condos is not sustainable for a residential neighborhood. Often the prices of such condo units are so inflated that it insures the property will remain a tax write-off for years to come.
One wonders just how “intelligent” such projects actually are
This does not appear to trouble city commissioners who, are either in developer’s pockets or are in on the project themselves. Cities are primarily concerned with increasing the tax base; quality of life issues often take a back seat. The irony is that Portland is regularly referred to as one of America’s “most livable” cities. Yet Portland suffers the same pains as Hong Kong or Jakarta when it comes to rapid development, with a huge and growing disparity between the haves and have-nots.
One of the most shocking sights in west coast cities is the number of people living on the streets. The depravity of living in a cardboard box while literally billions are invested in nearby high-end development projects is a crime beyond reckoning for an affluent society.
Frame housing must share frontage with multistory high-rise condo development
As long as our primary philosophy is grounded in some capitalist social-Darwinian fantasy, we will continue to allow developers to run roughshod over neighborhoods while the unemployed sleep under highway viaducts. An enlightened society would spend less time championing terra-forming redevelopment, and more time planning for socially equitable housing for all.
David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project
Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on The Tyranny of Development
August 16th, 2018
David Stairs
Way back in 2011 I first wrote about a wonderful device my friends in South Africa had come up with. Known as Eva, the Arivi paraffin stove had been an INDEX competition finalist in 2009, and had won an award from SABS, the South African Bureau of Standards, in 2011. While visiting them in Pretoria last Fall I caught a glimpse of social entrepreneurship on a micro-manufacturing level.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on Social Design and Micro-Manufacture
July 13th, 2018
David Stairs
Homemade hotplates
Some of the most interesting places in modern day Kampala are the tinsmith’s stalls opposite the Balikuddembe Market. Here sheet metal is daily transformed from dross into useful implements for household chores. The scope of activity is only limited by the workman’s imagination as numbers of boxes and appliances are tinkered together.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on The Kingdom of DIY
June 4th, 2018
David Stairs
Nativity façade of Sagrada Familia
If you are planning to visit Barcelona for reasons other than seeing the FCB, Futbol Club Barcelona, chances are you will visit a site designed by Antonio Gaudi. Gaudi is the city’s favorite son, and his works are among the town’s best-known tourist attractions.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on Nature’s Geometry
April 29th, 2018
David Stairs
The Original Omusajja along Entebbe Road
Along the highway leading from Uganda’s former colonial capital Entebbe to its modern capital Kampala there is a landmark that characterizes colonialism in a nutshell. Known as “Omusajja ku luguudo lweNtebbe” or just “Omusajja” for short in Lugandan, “the Man along Entebbe Road” is a fifteen-foot high statue of a white body builder flexing his muscles as the former symbol of durability for the Lweza Clays company.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on “The Man”
March 27th, 2018
David Stairs
Say what you want about Art Nouveau, but when it came to invention its practitioners were not short-handed. For an example, I turn to Gaudi’s most famous residence design.
Casa Battlo, or “House of Bones,” so named for its bone-like exterior columns
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Feature | Comments Off on World’s Most Decorative House
February 24th, 2018
David Stairs
When we speak of malls today Americans generally mean the air-conditioned, all-inclusive mega-mall with its food court and full-service-everything. But when I was a kid growing up in upstate New York such things didn’t exist, or, if they were being developed in cold places like Southdale Center (1956) we didn’t know about it. Of course, the idea of an indoor galleria was not new. The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, arguably the modern world’s first mall, was constructed in the 1860s in Milan, Italy.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on The Roadside Bazaar
January 23rd, 2018
David Stairs
Ruin porn is everywhere. Photos of Detroit’s semi-preserved Michigan Central Station abound, and photographers continue to document while critics and journalists debate the pros and cons of what Dora Apel in her recent book Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (2015) terms the “deindustrial sublime.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Repurposing Dinosaurs
December 28th, 2017
David Stairs
Slingshot made from bicycle innertube
I’ve talked many times about how successful African DIY design is when it comes to recycling materials. Most African nations are not heavily industrialized, except those involved in mining, so technology and manufactured goods are often imported. What’s more, the climate in many parts of the continent fluctuates between hot and dusty, or torrentially wet— not an ideal scenario for many materials.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on Thrift
December 2nd, 2017
David Stairs
There’s a little place in the Indian city of Agra famous as a testament of a man’s love for a woman.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Indian Journal | Comments Off on Crazy For Symmetry
November 17th, 2017
David Stairs
Completion of Kampala’s Northern Expressway has been plagued by delays in right-of-way acquisition
Returning to Uganda for the first time in ten years has held a few surprises. The charm of its people, and the beauty of Uganda’s countryside are unchanged, but the congestion in the capital Kampala is alarming. Partly this has to do with migration and growth. As the nation’s population increases, the sprawl of Kampala explodes.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on Gridlock
October 29th, 2017
David Stairs
I was recently in Prague, which in June 2017 celebrated the 75th anniversary of one of the most heroic and daring commando actions of the Second World War. On June 4, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia was attacked on his way to work when his Mercedes slowed at a bend in the road. His assailants, Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubis were Slovakian and Czech volunteers who had been trained in Britain and parachuted into Czechoslovakia to conduct Operation Anthropiod.
SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (courtesy Wikipedia)
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Designing Death
October 2nd, 2017
David Stairs
courtesy TheNation.com
The iconic images of Houston under 10 feet of water should have by now burned themselves into your brain. “How did we get to this point?” you ask. With one word: Design.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Design IS the Problem
August 13th, 2017
The third and final article in our series on the American prison system. —Ed.
Hannah Boyd
For you, DJ, the person who shared part of his life with me.
And for you, former mayor of Indianapolis Greg Ballard, the person who vehemently rejected the concept of prison slave labor, the implications of the 13th amendment, and the profiteering by corporations that makes everyone complicit in the practice of neo-slavery(1).
On day one of our architecture studio, we are tasked with designing a 4,000 bed jail with 27 courtrooms and administrative offices. The project had been an effort by former mayor Greg Ballard to consolidate the sprawling jail network that currently exists in Indianapolis (2). The project never came to fruition, and the new mayor, Joe Hogsett, is currently reviving the project with new ambitions (3).
—
The 13th Amendment
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Reparations
June 23rd, 2017
This essay continues our investigation of America’s prison system, and extends D-A-P’s collaboration with Ball State architecture students into the fifth year. —Ed.
Julia Voigt
Despite jails being one of the most recognizable typologies of the built environment, the criminal justice system itself is far removed from the realm of the architectural profession. This lack of attention given to the penal system within the profession highlights a larger, societal issue at hand: that, as noted by author Michelle Alexander, “… criminals are the one social group in America that nearly everyone–across political, racial and class boundaries–feels free to hate” (Alexander 228).
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Shared Meal
April 16th, 2017
David Stairs
Every once in awhile you meet a group of students that stands out. This was the case with my Junior studio a year ago. When we collaborated with the School of Businesses’ entrepreneurial contest, they were all in, and we just clicked. I knew 2017 would be my year to mentor our Graphic Design capstone project, and I wanted it to be good, so I signed up to teach the Fall senior studio leading into the winter capstone.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Critiquing the Prison Industrial Complex
February 25th, 2017
David Stairs
Image: David Stairs
I recently started reading Volker Ullrich’s biography HITLER: Ascent 1889-1939 out of a curiosity to better understand the motivations of the man often ranked as history’s most malevolent monster. Along the way I became fascinated by the parallels between Uncle Adolf and a more recent demagogue of the American ilk. These are the similarities I noted:
•Mendacious use of facts
•Scapegoating a religious group
•Extreme nationalism
•Intolerance for criticism
•Bullying as a defense tactic
•Narcissistic
•Authoritarian
•Inciting violence
•Histrionic
•Temperamental
•Censorious
•Contempt for adversaries
•Dislike for administrative work
•Prima donna tendencies
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on The Power of John Heartfield
January 13th, 2017
David Stairs
Control is the object of consolidation, what Nietsche once called the “will to power.”
Soul Searching
Consider the rise of multinational corporations. Monopoly is the capitalist ideal. Although shrouded in so-called antitrust laws preventing market domination— the idea being that competition is healthy for markets— captains of industry have always sought market dominance. For brief periods of time some capitalists, Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller to name two, dominated their industries and became enormously wealthy.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on On Swallowing and Being Swallowed
