Amy Thibodeau Archive

Living Well with Less Space

By Amy Thibodeau, June 8, 2010, 10:15 pm in Architecture, Culture, Present

I am living a life of extremes right now. I’ve spent the last six weeks in a very large, luxurious home on the edge of the desert in Arizona. There are three large bedrooms all with en suite bathrooms and walk-in closets, an enormous ‘great room’, media room, etc. I’m not complaining – it’s been great – but it isn’t how I’m used to living and was certainly not possible in London, UK.

On Saturday, we’re heading to Mexico for six weeks to live in a small bungalow near the ocean with no air conditioning and fairly basic amenities. After our time in the land of air conditioning, SUVs and golf courses I have been a little apprehensive about how we’re going to adapt. Then I spent some time getting inspired by how much some creative people are able to make of tiny spaces. Here are some of my favourites:

Paul Elkins Tiny Mobile Shelter
“The shelter is lightweight, water tight and able to collect rainwater, and includes an area for displaying and selling handmade wares.” (Text and image from Apartment Therapy)


Gary Chang – 24 Rooms in One
“This room — the “maximum kitchen,” he calls it — and the “video game room” he was sitting in minutes before are just 2 of at least 24 different layouts that Mr. Chang, an architect, can impose on his 344-square-foot apartment, which he renovated last year. What appears to be an open-plan studio actually contains many rooms, because of sliding wall units, fold-down tables and chairs, and the habitual kinesis of a resident in a small space. As Mr. Chang put it, “I glide around.” (Text from the New York Times)

Tiny Apartments in a Hong Kong Housing Estate
Michael Wolf has documented many of these small 100 x 100 spaces. Some of residents make better use of their space than others. (Photo by Michale Wolf)

Living in a Yurt
“We talk all the time about living with less; Dave lives in 706 square feet with off grid power, a composting toilet, a shower and a full kitchen and didn’t give anything up at all to live in comfort and style. When you live in 706 square feet you don’t need much to run it; he collects water from his roof, power from the sun and wind, heat from sustainably cut wood. He spends about six hundred bucks a year for his propane barbeque, gas for his chainsaw and log splitter and that is about it.” (Text by Treehugger, Yurt image by Bill Janis)

Update!

Supertramp’s Bicycle Caravan

Via Twitter GoldenGus has pointed me to a really cool, alternative use of small space. “Jacob aka ‘Supertramp’ is embarking on a voyage around London exploring the concept of micro-sized living; inspired by a more minimal, fluid and socially aware approach to future living, the project seeks to promote and inspire leaner, more livable life forms … His new mobile house doubles up as an agency and a social facility point, offering a unique, intimate and conversational platform where people will both inspire and be inspired.” For more on this project visit Nell Osbourne on Posterous (which is also where the image is from).

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Do Full Moons Cause People to Become More Violent?

By Amy Thibodeau, June 1, 2010, 11:15 pm in Past, Psychology

The werewolf myth is one that has become iconic in popular culture. There are dozens (at least) of films about the full moon turning human beings into monsters from An American Werewolf in Paris to the classic from the 1950s, The Curse of the Werewolf. The legend of the werewolf can be traced back deep into literature and myth from around the world. In The Metamorphoses, Ovid writes of King Lycaon who is changed into a werewolf by the gods after eating tainted meat.

Although there is some evidence to suggest that full moons might cause changes in human behaviour, it is mostly anecdotal and too sporadic to be considered factual. For example, in 1978 a study called Human Aggression and the Lunar Synodic Cycle found that in “11,613 cases of aggravated assault in a 5-year period: assaults occurred more often around the full moon.” (source)

More recently, in 2007, Sussex police announced that they found a correlation between the incidence of violence among drinkers in the seaside town of Brighton.

“I compared a graph of full moons and a graph of last year’s violent crimes and there is a trend,” Inspector Andy Parr told the Brighton Argus newspaper. “People tend to be more aggressive generally. I would be interested in approaching the universities and seeing if any of their post-graduates would be interested in looking into it further. This could be helpful to us.” (source)

It should be noted that “in separate findings,  [the Brighton] police also found that violence in pubs and nightclubs increased on paydays.”

Image: Full Crow Moon by Dave

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The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Another Look at Unethical Medicine

By Amy Thibodeau, May 31, 2010, 10:41 pm in Medicine, Past

Tuskegee is a small city in Alabama, which has played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement. It still houses Tuskegee University, which began as the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington; it is also where Rosa Parks was born. Sadly, it is also the location of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

According to Tuskegee University, it all began in the 1920s when a Chicago-based charity approached the government via the Public Health Service (PHS) with some ideas for improving the health of African Americans. The PHS had a special interest in addressing Syphilis as they’d recently completed a study that showed that upwards of 25% of a 2,000 person sample were afflicted with it.

Although the study may have began with good intentions, it shifted from being about helping those afflicted with the disease to becoming a study about the effects of untreated Syphilis on live patients.

the time of the project, African Americans had almost no access to medical care. For many participants, the examination by the PHS physician was the first health examination they had ever received. Along with free health examinations, food and transportation were supplied to participants. Thus, it was not difficult to recruit African American men as participants in the study. Burial stipends were used to get permission from family members to perform autopsies on study participants. (source)

You can imagine where they went with this. With a captive audience of living subjects at their disposal, the PHS made the horrifying decision that in order to study the disease in living patients they would not disclose the illness and instead would watch as patients slowly deteriorated and eventually died from it. In some cases, they even prevented subjects from receiving treatment from other sources: “During World War II, about 50 of the study subjects were ordered by their draft boards to undergo treatment for syphilis. The PHS requested that the draft boards exclude study subjects from the requirement for treatment. The draft boards agreed.” (source)

Unbelievably, this study continued until the late 1970s. When the director of the PHS department responsible for the study between 1943 and 1948 was interviewed in 1981 he admitted, “The men’s status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical material, not sick people.” (source)

Further reading: Henrietta Lacks and the Tragic Story of Medical Ethics, Racial Politics and Health Care Reform in America.

Image: Disease by Erik Starck

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The Kouklitas – Art Dolls with a Gothic Narrative

By Amy Thibodeau, May 31, 2010, 4:24 pm in Art, Present, Toys

New York based artist Andrew Yang hand-makes these strange little dolls – named Kouklitas after the Greek word for doll koukla – out of muslin and hand paints their faces. There are different ranges of dolls, including a more commercial ‘Editorial’ line based on the collections of major fashion houses like Givenchy and Lanvin. Cooler and creepier are the ‘Collection’, which features a range of whimsical characters that look like they’ve been transported out of the stories of the Brother’s Grimm. Each doll has a name and, best of all, a narrative explaining who she is and how she came to be. The Gothic origin stories are often based in post-civil war New Orleans.

Of the Clora and Clarice doll (pictured above):

Cora and Clarice, Clarice and Cora. This set of unique twins was born in ante-bellum New Orleans to Irish immigrant parents Cieran and Cara McCarthy, who were reportedly barely making ends meet as music teachers. Before they were out of the crib the wonder twins were proficient in the violin and piano. Eventually they toured Europe; after their famous Dresden performance in a family induced interpretation of an opera ballet version of Swan Lake, their fame and wealth were cemented. Both girls maintained dozens of lovers, but they were always shared. Shortly after the twins settled in London at the peak of their careers, a certain Harold Hartfordshire blatantly favored Clarice, the more timid of the girls. After Mr. Hartfordshire was found brutally murdered in his York estate, Clarice shocked the world with her confession implicating her sister, therefore herself, in the horrible crime. They were tried and hung, and are noted to be “the first publicly executed set of conjoined twins.”

If you don’t fancy any of the collection dolls, Yang also creates custom dolls. But do they come with their own personal histories?

Image from the Koulitas website

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Noah Webster – ‘Father’ of the American Copyright System

By Amy Thibodeau, May 14, 2010, 7:47 pm in Culture, Language, Past

Noah Webster is best known for his role in cementing a distinct American culture through his changes to English language conventions and spelling following the American Revolution. Webster believed in that in order to prosper as an independent nation, America needed to embrace a culture distinct from its British colonial roots. He set about contributing to this by adapting the spelling of common words and including around 12,000 new words into his dictionary, which is now the standard in use across the USA. Major grammar and spelling changes attributed to Webster include changing most words with an -our ending in British spelling (i.e. honour) to an -or spelling in America (i.e. honor); he also changed most -ise word endings (i.e. apologise) to have -ize endings (i.e. apologize).

Although Webster borrowed liberally from the popular British-convention dictionaries of his time, once he had created and published his own opus, he wanted to protect his intellectual property. Webster was mainly concerned with publishers who, at the time, were permitted to reprint entire books without seeking the permission of the author and without providing them with any compensation.

In the 1700s the Federal government of the United States did not hold a lot of oversight over laws in the various states and the area of copyright was no exception. As such, when he began campaigning for copyright protection for his books, he was told he would have to seek protection in each independent state. In large part, due to his campaigning, under the new American constitution passed in 1789, the Federal government was granted greater oversight over the states, which enabled it to pass the first Federal copyright act one year later.

Webster continued to work for better copyright legislation for the rest of his life. His efforts were rewarded in the 1830-1831 congressional session … [when] the new law granted protection of the author or his heirs for 28 years, with the right of renewal for another 14 years. (source)

This new law remained in effect until 1909, long after Webster’s death.

Unlike current copyright legislation, which tends to be driven by big industry and is often enacted against the individual, Webster’s vision of copyright was one that protected artists against the publishing industry, which sought to profit off their work without compensating them. Webster’s law does not address or consider punishing individuals who seek to share and use intellectual property for non-profit purposes. As one source notes, Webster “might with more justice be termed the “father of royalties,” as he was one of the first to exact payment from his publishers according to the number of books they printed or that he licensed to them.” (source)

I wonder how Webster would feel about the various copyright battles being fought around the world today?

Image Credit: Noah Webster engraving via Wikipedia Commons

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