Dwell Nov-11

“What you newspaper and magazine writers, who work in rabbit time, don’t understand is that the practice of architecture has to be measured in elephant time.” So said Eero Saarinen to a journalist in 1953. In 2011, architecture may still be doing well on elephant time, but we writers are now also bloggers and tweeters, and the pace of our work makes that of a rabbit look glacial. The media landscape has changed so much that the office I began working in more than a decade ago, replete with its slide library, contact sheets, and flat files for artwork, seems like a distant dream. When Dwell launched at the end of the first dot-com boom in its San Francisco epicenter, the idea of a print start-up already seemed quaint to…

My indulged, spoiled, babied, and much-loved pet chickens will be clamoring for one of those incredible coops if I let them see the photos (“If You Build It, They Will Cluck,” July/August 2011)! While they have a nice basic house of their own, designed and built by my husband, a building inspector, it doesn’t compare to the three beautiful, stylish, and eco-friendly structures designed by the gifted Bertie County, North Carolina, students in the Studio H design-build class. My birds have the run of a fenced three-acre yard all day, but they would really have something to crow about if they got to spend every night in Coopus Maximus. Thank you for including this terrific article, showcasing the talent and creativity of both the students and the teachers. Diane H.…

Nicholas Calcott Photographer Nicholas Calcott recently relocated to Brooklyn from Paris. Shooting Maurice Russell and Jorge Fontanez’s home in Manhattan (“Tunnel Vision,” p. 84) involved extreme temptation. “We’d be setting up for the next shot and they would be preparing dinner,” he says. “Then, the most in tense and delicious aromas would fill the room. This made it hard to concentrate, but they invited us to join them for dinner after the shoot was finished.” Céline Clanet Paris-based photographer Céline Clanet spent a year shooting images of the dams, power plants, and people of the Beaufortain area of the French Alps, some of which are featured in “From Torrent to Current” (p. 98). Now obsessed with dams, Clanet is seriously considering a proposal to install a hydroelectric plant on the…

Shortcuts are nothing new, but most folks are too busy absentmindedly following—or initiating—them to stop and truly notice the way these trails regrid the pedestrian landscape. Dutch photographer Jan-Dirk van der Burg spent four years capturing the evocatively dubbed olifantenpaadjes—literally “elephant paths”—all over the Netherlands. The results provide a droll glimpse into a most basic animal instinct: to conveniently close the gap from here to there. olifantenpaadjes.nl…

Fabian Debora believes in the transformative power of art. A tumultuous childhood in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles set him on a path toward drugs and gangs, but putting pen to paper helped him turn his life around. He is currently a substance abuse counselor at Homeboy Industries, a center that helps youths redirect their lives through mentoring programs and employment in its growing businesses. Debora is also their resident artist, merging his two responsibilities by using art as a form of therapy. A recent collaboration with Artecnica allowed the Homeboys to express their skills with a collection of totes. What’s your earliest memory of experimenting with art? I was ten years old—about to be expelled from school—and [Homeboy Industries founder] Father Greg Boyle told me to go…

When Austrian entrepreneur Erich Sattler refocused his family’s business from mixed agriculture to grape growing, he needed headquarters to house the budding wine enterprise. He turned to his architect brother, Kurt, to design a winery capable of production, bottling, and cellaring on the ground-floor wine hall, with guest accommodations, presentation space, and an office in the wine loft above. Though it isn’t the only winery in Tadten— their residential adjacency is common in the region—Kurt explains how its distinctly modern styling sets it apart. “Computer simulations were used to exploit the effect of the sun on the space and make the most of cross-ventilation. The upper terraces are situated east to west, which maximizes heat absorption in winter and resistance in summer.” “To keep the ground floor a constant 60…