Seamus Heaney: Digging

One can hear the slice of the spade in this poem Heaney wrote as a young man, and here in 2009, read in his seventies.  This was my father's favourite poem.  In his memory. 

the Bathurst hedge

12 July 1962. Britain's tallest hedge. TopFoto.co.uk

sorry about the proprietal watermark, but the hedge ladder is so interesting.  This is from TopFoto's 50 Years Ago Today: 12 July 1962.  Britain's tallest hedge undergoes its annual trim which takes three gardeners ten days to complete by hand.  Planted in 1720, it is part of the estate owned by the Earl and Countess of Bathurst in Cirencester.

2008: Britain's tallest yew hedge given a trim. The Daily Telegraph, 11 Aug 2008
The quantity-obsessed Daily Mail reported in 2008 that it is now 'the 300 year-old hedge on Lord Allen Apsley's Bathurst Estate', and that it cost £5000 to trim it.  The Telegraph, picking up the same feed, adds that 'Two workers spent two days on a 70ft high cherry-picker cutting back six inches of new growth, which produced nearly a tonne of clippings.  These are then sold to pharmaceutical companies who use yew extract as a key ingredient of Docetaxel, a chemotherapy drug used mainly for breast, ovarian and lung cancer.'

Who'd have known.

Interesting too that they used to be gardeners, part of the cost of running the estate; now they are contract workers and an invoice must be paid.

how to lay a hedge

Theo Jansen's Strandbeest

and his website is here:

glass block lights

the Tuff Block Light installedA press release came in the mail today about a glass block with LED lighting embedded in it.  It is from Arizona, and the brochure stresses that the inventor is Harold P Kopp, Blind Veteran, USN Retired.  The website is even more curious: the back story of Kopp's various bouts with illness appears to be as important as product information. It is certainly more important than spelling.  Whatever, the lights have a life of 50,000 hours and are laid in with regular brick or block paving.  The brochure appears to come from some other century altogether.  Is this one man working away in his garage, inventing clever electrical devices and then running off product information on his printer and mailing them at some expense to architecture magazines all over the continent?  It appears so. 

It is a bit like the cat's eyes story where Percy Shaw laboured away in near-destitution for 5 years during the depression before someone in the Ministry of Transport recognised that with the blackout conditions in WWII in England, some sort of low-level road lighting system such as reflective marbles embedded in the road would be of some use. 

The cost of the Tuff Block Light is prohibitive: $US 80 each, plus all the wiring laid down the side of your driveway, or patio or sidewalk.  To get something like this to take off it would need a large government contract attached to some sort of safety bylaw, then when it was in production in a mass-market sort of way, one could start to do some quite nice things with these blocks.   On second thought,  I'll wait for one with photovoltaic cells.  On third thought, I'll just use a hand crank flashlight.  No. On fourth thought, I'll just eat more carrots and develop my night vision. 

Bill Burns

Bill Burns. Safety Gear for Small Animals. Respirator, 10 x 11 x 6 cm, 1994/1999Bill Burns is originally from Saskatchewan, studied at Goldsmiths, now lives in Toronto, has work in major collections here and abroad.  He is best known for his series Safety Gear for Small Animals, 1996-2000, a collection of tiny helmets, gas masks, life jackets, hazmat suits and goggles for rats and gophers and other tiny neighbours.
 
Curiously the effect does not anthropomorphise the animals, the little life jackets simply remind us that we don't look after animals at all.  If not actively trying to exterminate them, we ignore them, so busy are we looking after ourselves as we elbow our way into the lifeboat, first leaving everyone else to go down with the ship. 

Safety Gear for Small Animals led to the more recent project, Boiler Suits for Primates, 2006 which is a suitcase of miniature versions of all the things given to people incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay: orange jumpsuits, rubber thongs, towels, a bucket, toothpaste.  These are considered the bleak essentials of life it seems, and by putting them into the context of Safety Gear for Small Animals, the parallel to zoos is undeniable.  Detainees are stripped of their humanity, but still given toothpaste.

The ambiguity between mankind and animalkind is the subject of Burns' work.  It is a similar project to that of Yann Martel who uses animals as eloquent voices of the blindly fumbling human condition.  George Orwell was another.  Somehow when the rather selfish ambitions of human beings are made to come out clear and pure from the mouths of animals who, if we think about them at all, we consider innocents, we are shocked.

the Holzweg

Arndt Menke-Zumbrägel. Holzweg, 2008Arndt Menke's wood bike uses wood as a sophisticated material, rather than a low-tech material that shows its vegetative lineage.  There is a standard set of images of the Holzweg, found on several design websites, that show its details, parts and assembly.

Arndt Menke-Zumbrägel. Holzweg. Laminated bentwood back wheel strut.It is possible that this too is mainly a bamboo bicycle as the photos show wood tubes for the frame pieces.  Reamed wood wouldn't be as strong as bamboo with its hollow integrity.  The most interesting part, a bentwood, laminated back wheel strut, is not, as far as I can find, discussed at all. The bentwood piece is laminated from four shaped pieces and then shaped to fit into the tubular metal lugs.  This would give it both strength and spring, giving some suspension movement in the back wheel.

Arndt Menke-Zumbruagel. Holzweg. Forming the bentwood back wheel strut.The frame weighs 2.3 kg.  A comparably responsive ride, a full suspension frame, ranges from 2kg to 5kg (2.8 for aluminum might be typical). 

We've gone through a long period of time where as individuals we have been told we can't make anything ourselves.  We certainly can't fix our own cars, where once everyone was his own mechanic.  What I like about all these wood bikes is that one could actually make one without a metal workshop, without welding equipment and a welding ticket.  These bikes are about assembly of parts, rather than sealed monolithic units, bought ready to go and only repairable by professionals.  That just seems so disengaged now.


bambucicletas

Having been away from my home and native land for four months, in my other home and native land, I have been surprisingly disoriented since being back.  After looking at  a small house project Saturday in the far south west, I came back with the contractor I generally work with when I do such things so he could collect his old Sawsall which I borrowed four years ago to hack out some joists set too high for a floor I was replacing.  It was a long story and brute violence was needed to solve it.  Anyway, my front room was a mess: half unpacked, stacks of papers everywhere.  I bleated 'magazine', 'moving', 'ill', 'too much', etc.  and then spent the rest of the afternoon simply clearing my work table.  I now have a tidy stack of little notes of ideas.  I have similar stacks in each room – neat things I read, or hear on the radio, or think of, fascinating bits of news.  What to do with these little notes, each worthy of a dissertation at least.  If I work through them here for a bit, I can throw them away.  It won't be a series of dissertations, but I can air them and let them go.

This is the danger of misc files: they are brilliant, and unwieldly, and provocative, and oppressive, inducing much guilt that one is not pursuing them, working them out, making connections.

So.  Bamboo bikes

First patented in 1894, bamboo frames are lightweight, responsive and quiet. Bamboo is evidently 17% stronger than steel in certain directions.  Craig Calfee in Santa Cruz has been producing high-tech bamboo bikes for several years and is the acknowledged expert, although bamboo bikes have long been built in China.

Calfee Bamboo Cargo bike, built in Ghana. The back wheel is bamboo-reinforced and capable of carrying 640 lbs.The straight pieces are heat treated bamboo.  Instructables has step-by-step  instructions on how to build such a bike: it mortices the bamboo together at the joints and then makes hemp and fibreglas reinforced wrappings around the joints.  Better pictures are here.

The other way to join the pieces is to use carbon fibre, steel or other metal pre-formed lugs into which the bamboo poles fit.  Otherwise, one needs all the rest of the parts: chain, wheels and brakes recycled from ordinary bikes.  The front fork is often metal it seems, rather than bamboo: something to do with stability.

The Bamboo Bike Project in Ghana, Kenya and other African countries was started by several people in different research units at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. BBP is setting up bamboo bike production in local workshops, with local bamboo, that are sturdier than metal bikes and more suited to carrying loads over rough roads. 

There are, of course, obsessives who are working to make everything out of bamboo as a kind of pure design exercise.  Flavio Deslandes is a Brasilian industrial designer living in Denmark. His bike uses a back brake which is much more elegant than all those cables.  Evidently there is much research into bamboo spokes, but couldn't find any pics except for the bamboo reinforcing on the cargo bike above.

Flavio Deslandes. Bambucicleta. Rio de JaneiroIt's all quite exciting, and there are pages of websites, so it must be quite a common project.  I just hadn't heard of it. 

Fairey Marine hot-moulded hulls

Fairey Marine, Hamble, England. A hot-moulded mahogany hull.

Back to plywood.  In the next issue of On Site: small things, we have an article by Charles Lawrence who writes about Fairey Marine which took Fairey Aviation's wartime wood laminate experience in making aircraft to the making of powerboats in the 1950s and 60s.  They built up a monococque hull with six layers of wood glued in cross directions over a solid block form, and then the whole lot was baked at boiling point in an autoclave, producing a lightweight nearly indestructible hull.
 
It was in a white Fairey Huntress that James Bond chased his enemies, in Fairey Huntsmans, in From Russia With Love.  Wonderfully evocative names for these boats: Fantome, Swordsman, Spearfish.  Fleet and nimble, slicing through the waves, many are still in the water.  

The hot-moulded Fairey hull, like the moulded Eames chairs, eventually went over to fibreglas and, I expect, much of the magic was lost. 
  

the monobloc plastic chair

Simon Palfrey. 8-year-old Kunde boy with ruptured appendix, being carried 12 hours and 25 km in this chair to local airstrip for evacuation to Kathmandu.While looking for an image of the original Eames splint used during the Second World War, the technology of which led to his chair experiments, I came across this use of an ordinary plastic lawn chair in Katmandu being used for emergency transport.  Its light weight and rigidity would be key here.

Jens Thiel, who is working on a book, a documentary and an exhibition on monobloc plastic chairs, has a website full of pictures of these chairs in all settings, in all variations, all kinds of repairs and uses. 

designboom.com has a short history of monobloc plastic chair development.  They are cheap – $3 to make, and they are made all over the world. Although polypropylene is recyclable they are too big for our blue bins and are often found in fragments set out with the garbage, and living in the rich west as we do, we rarely see the inventive uses found by Thiel or the repairs and re-use.  Thiel points out that inexpensive as they are, they are still equal to a day's salary in many places, and so are valued, helped along when they get elderly, repaired lovingly.

Jens Thiel and Daniel Spehr. Rapaired backrest, sewen with wire.

MEND, New Zealand

Rob Buchanan, founder and director of MEND: Mobility Equipment for the Needs of the DisabledA couple of years ago one of the World Challenge entries was by MEND which had set up small workshops in very isolated villages in Nepal to make artificial limbs out of aluminum cans and discarded plastic.  The mandate of MEND – Mobility Equipment for the Needs of the Disabled, is 'to help disabled children and adults become mobile, independent and trained in skills that can lead to employment, and so achieve dignity in their communities'.
Imported prostheses are  too expensive and too rare, generally children in remote areas who lose limbs are left just to get on with it.
 
MEND is based in New Zealand and now has workshops and centres in Nepal, India, several African countries and Fiji, all to do with achieving mobility by local initiatives and means.    The brief video on the World Challenge site shows a pile of cans being fed into a mould where they will melt and come out as a leg: lightweight, with attachment points for straps and attachments.  Could it be simpler? yet how much invention and testing went into this process so that it was safe for the people in the workshop.  There is a committment to these low-tech manufacturing processes that are sophisticated beyond anything we make in our wealthy country.   

In this next issue of On Site, which is about small things, we have one article by a young architect, Peter Osborne, who, in building a folding bookshelf/storage unit found himself limited not by his imagination, but by his skill with plywood and saws.  The other is by architect Ron Wickman who, because his father was in a wheelchair, sees all architecture in terms of its accessibility.  He makes the very valid point that in handing out awards for amazing buildings, we never let a ramp get in the way of a grand entrance. 

So, two issues: appropriate technology and human rights.  Is this about architecture?  Absolutely, it is about design.  Our culture medicalises disabilities instead of seeing them as opportunities for useful design thinking.  When I was pushing my elderly aunt up and down hills in her 2-ton wheelchair – it was practically uncontrollable – it occurred to me then that surely there was a better way to do this.  Watching the amazingly designed and engineered chairs and limbs on display in the Paralympics right now, it is evident that there is.  Now this engineering and manufacture has to be made accessible.  

Barefoot College, Tilonia

The Barefoot College was entirely built by Barefoot Architects. The campus spreads over 80,000 square feet area and consists of residences, a guest house, a library, dining room, meeting halls, an open air theatre, an administrative block, a ten-bed referral base hospital, pathological laboratory, teacher's training unit, water testing laboratory, a Post Office, STD/ISD call booth, a Craft Shop and Development Centre, an Internet dhaba (cafe), a puppet workshop, an audio visual unit, a screen printing press, a dormitory for residential trainees and a 700,000 litre rainwater harvesting tank. The College is also completely solar-electrified. The College serves a population of over 125,000 people both in immediate as well as distant areasBarefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan trains illiterate or under-educated women and men in practical engineering.  Women do 70% of the domestic and agricultural work in India, however Barefoot College has, since the early 1970s, been training women in what are considered technically challenging men's professions such as solar engineers, handpump mechanics, computer instructors, masons, night school teachers.
 
The College does not prioritise literacy, but rather problem-solving skills such as basic law, making women aware of the Right to Information, minimum wages, violation of human rights.  This, along with their training and employment, give them a way out of the sheer, numbing drudgery of rural life for women in most of the world.
 
Having solar lamps allows night school and less use of kerosene, toxic in closed spaces.  Having rainwater harvesting systems allows women more time to do other things than walk miles each day collecting pots of water, or firewood, or candles.
The mandate of Barefoot College is very much about the empowerment of rural, barely literate women caught in a caste system and rigid social roles.  At the same time it has trained 15,000 women and installed thousands of solar lighting units and rainwater harvesting systems.

Barefoot College does not give out degrees or even certificates that could perhaps become a kind of currency leading to migration. They do not want their trainees to move to the cities, but to stay in place, in their communities.  Plans are to extend Barefoot College to Africa and South America.  Bunker Roy, the founder, says language isn't a problem.  Sign language will do.
 
I suppose that one solders a circuit plate the same way no matter what language is spoken.  This in itself is a revolutionary idea.  We are altogether too logocentric here.

small tools held in great affection

my all-time favourite tool: little hammer, hatchet, screwdriver, nail puller, wire cutter, pliers and whatever that top bit is called that cuts the heads off nails.  Sturdy, dates from before the 1950s, a novelty item perhaps, but surprisingly useful it has been.  And it is so tiny.
 
Is there a name for tools that combine many functions?  where something can be a hammer and an inch later a wirecutter?  It is the opposite of that other attitude: the proper tool for every job.  That is what Lee Valley is based on.  No, this little handy dandy does not expect anyone to use it with great finesse, its function is to be helpful as one is muttering and banging around in the basement and hey presto! there it is, a tiny hammer to knock out a cottar pin wedged in the handle at the back of a clock, as happened this morning.  

Humour me, I'm on my holidays and such things loom large.

Lou Lynn: retro-active

Lou Lynn. Tools as Artifacts. 2009. glass, bronze

There used to be a junk store in Inglewood that just sold tools.  Most of the stuff I have came from it, a few pieces were bought new when I first moved to Calgary – my hammer and saw, and when the old CPR fellow across the alley died his son came to clear out the house and told me to take what I wanted from his father's workroom.  Which I did, except for the 4' piece of steel rail bolted to the bench.  

What I love about these old wrenches and planes, rakes and shovels, saws and chisels is the excellent steel of which they were made and the beautiful handles, satiny with long use under pressure. Compared to new tools with their bright dayglo colours and plastic handles, these old pieces are quiet and still, dark and graceful.

Lou Lynn, a sculptor living in the Slocan Valley, has had an exhibition, Retro-Active, travelling around the province this past year.  She works in bronze and glass, using the heft and monumentalism of basic tool shapes.  Some of the pieces are very large: cast glass adze heads, so large one's hand is Lilliputian.  Tools as Artifacts, 38 bronze and glass pieces pinned in a long line on the wall, are hand-scaled and like many old artifacts, each piece looks like a tool, but the function is unclear.  A piece with a bronze handle and a frosted glass prong is both humorous and mysterious.

In the Nanaimo Museum & Gallery installation Helen Sibelius, the curator of the retrospective, has paired Lynn's work with mining and forestry tools from the museum's collection.  These are no less mysterious: a half-inch thick iron spike like a 6-foot long knitting needle with a small wood handle at the top.
 
In all of this it is the small details that are so poignant.  A plain turned wood handle has a tiny line inscribed half an inch from where it joins the steel: a small, non-functional reference to a ferrule.  Lynn's sculptures makes much of these small details: she isn't making tools, but she is very aware of the hands that made tools, once, and all the small vanities they added to them.

Lou Lynn. Ladle. 2009 bronze, glass, 56 x 46 x 26cm.

small things: Josh Silver's adjustable glasses

Michael Lewis. Adjustable Glasses, The Guardian December 22, 2008Josh Silver is an atomic physicist at Oxford who invented adjustable liquid-filled lenses for eyeglasses.  Given the lack of eye doctors in Africa especially, such glasses allow the wearer to adjust the lenses themselves.  A clever little syringe on the frame fills flexible sacs, sandwiched between two durable plastic shields, with liquid and when the sac is the right thickness to correct the vision problem, the lens is sealed with a screw.  Silver is the archetypal rumpled and brilliant inventor, seen demonstrating his glasses in a TED lecture here.  There is a fairly complete description from 2008 in the Guardian here.  There is, of course, the website asking for help in this project here.

I would say this is a small thing, with huge consequences.  Esther Addley in the Guardian article points out that having glasses improves literacy rates and extends the working life of people who use their eyes to read, sew, embroider, mend nets – any kind of fine work.  A large scheme would train thousands of eye doctors to work in remote regions without much infrastructure or services – a large task indeed.  The small scheme is to put into production simple, self-adjusting glasses and to produce millions of them. 

Issue 23 (call for articles) wants to look at how small moves, small projects, small things can make large changes.  It is important to look at this for many, many reasons, not least of which is that western society is cut off from fine scale detail.  We can't fix our own cars, make our own clothes, cut our own hair or fix our own glasses; we seem incapable of invention. 

I would like a pair of these adjustable glasses – I'm wearing +1.25 readers bought from Nanaimo's Midland Liquidators in 1996 for $10 and they could use a bit of tuning. 

Kenya Ceramic Jiko

reproduced from 'With Our Own Hands'. IRDC 1986

Jikos are traditional charcoal stoves in Kenya made from scrap metal: a small drum has a grate set in the middle.  A fire is made below the grate, pots sit on the top of the drum.  It is a form brought from India to Kenya by railway buildings in the 1890s.  They are inefficient and consume a lot of charcoal.
Kenya Ceramic Jiko (KCJ) is an improved version adapted in 1982  from the ceramic charcoal stoves found in Thailand.  The top chamber is lined with a pottery liner made from clay, rice husks and ash cemented to the metal. The grate is either pottery or metal and the drum is now waisted: the fire is in the bottom chamber, the grate is small and the top flares out to hold the cooking pot.  The KCJ is 50% more fuel efficient.

The Mountain Gorilla population of Central Africa is near extinction because of deforestation due to the production of charcoal.  A workshop has been set up for the local manufacture of ceramic Jikos to reduce the demand for charcoal in areas with massive refugee populations, such as Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  This will reduce the illegal harvesting of wood in the nearby Virunga National Park, the last refuge of the Mountain Gorilla.

This comes by way of the World Challenge