Monday, November 27, 2006

Last Post I'm posting for the first time in weeks, and what I'd intended to do is to review The Perfect $100,000 House, a new book in which architecture critic Karrie Jacobs recounts "a trip across America and back in pursuit of a place to call home." I enjoyed the book: I liked traveling along with Jacobs as she sought out architects and homebuilders around the country—ex-hippie design-builders in Vermont, prefab architect-entrepreneurs in Missouri and Texas, alternative energy communards in New Mexico, idealistic professors in Kansas and Alabama, etc. etc. But what I liked most about the book weren't any of its particular profiles, but rather its driving (so to speak) idea: The Perfect $100,000 House is a road book, which means that it is an unabashedly old-fashioned book. I say this as a compliment: to hit the road in your Volkswagen Cabrio in seach of a good affordable house is coast-to-coast (and back) affirmation of the value of experience over ethernet—of the superior understanding of places and persons that comes from encounters that are grounded, sensual, multi-dimensional . . . old-fashioned. Nowadays none of us needs to log 14,520 miles (!) to learn about the Rural Studio, or Rocio Romero's modernist prefabs, or Dan Rockhill's Studio 804, or any of the estimable enterprises Jacobs visits. Nowadays all we need to do is to log on, and follow Google wherever it goes. I've been thinking a lot lately about this tension between real and virtual, between on-the-ground and online—a tension that seems to me inevitable and ongoing as our culture migrates more and more from print to web, from public theater to private screen, from communal connection to micro-niche market. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this won't be that review I set out to write, but instead my last post on "Pixel Points." I've had a great time blogging on Arts Journal, but I've just gone on my own cross-country journey: I've moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Phoenix, Arizona, to take on the directorship of the Phoenix Urban Research Laboratory, a program recently begun by the College of Design at Arizona State University. Stay tuned for our updated website: the Phoenix Urban Research Lab will be a mix of think tank, project design center, lecture and conference venue, and publications generator, and via all of these activities an advocate for progressive urban thinking, in the Southwest and beyond. Boston to Phoenix is, of course, a big transition—from harborside to high desert, from compact colonial settlement to sprawling modern metropolis, from old urbanism to 21st-century urbanism . . . still a work-in-progress, and all the more exciting for being so. posted by nancylevinson @ 9:00 pm | Permanent link