May 8, 2004

• On WorldChanging, an entry about 'biophilia,' which is an architectural/design movement emphasizing evolutionary psychology. The idea being that human beings have an instinctual desire to be where they can see the landscape, know where to hide if there's a predator, feel the natural rythms of sun rise and set, and so forth. (A parenthetical sentence in the cited article says: as Heerwagen and Gordon Orians describe it in The Biophilia Hypothesis, “habitability cues, resource availability, shelter and predator protection, hazard cues, wayfinding and movement”.) Studies show significant improvements in productivity in such spaces.

  This got me thinking about the old punk warehouse I visited a few times. While not biophilial in design, it was constructed out of found material gleaned from the dumpsters and free piles of Oakland, California. Every piece that wasn't an original floor or wall or joist was something someone else had thrown away, and brought and placed by the folks who lived there. The end result of this was that you could ask for the story behind anything in the place, and there would be one. You've heard the phrase 'storybook house?' Well, here was an actual one.

  I'm interested in the stories that places can tell.

  For Cinco De Mayo, I went with some friends to a Mexican restaurant/bar/patio party with a DJ type thing. Woot. Craziness. But the point is that I met the person that's living in the room where I used to live in Ballard. I joked that there were probably some dead skin cells left around somewhere as evidence that I lived there, and she responded with a mixture of revulsion and good humor. Which is good. But the moral is that if you get out your handy scanning electron microscope and look in the crevices of the floorboards, you might find whole bookstores'-worth of stories.

  And maybe you don't even need a scanning electron microscope. Just a scanning electron perceptiveness.

  • 5:34 am
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