Traditional Thai Elevated Housing
Vernacular Elevated Housing (mostly south east asia)
Typical Elevated Beach / Resort Housing
Biloxi Elevated Single Family Housing (since the storm)
Gray was a furniture designer before she was an architect and she kept designing all types of household items her whole life. Not only did she draw these pieces up but many of them she manufactured herself in her Paris workshop.
Mindfull of the lessons of de Stijl, she often drew folded out elevations of each room to really get a sense of the interior space rather than just focusing on facades and floor plans to create form. Like Loos, she was interested in the experience of being inside a space and really focused on materiality to produce her desired effects.
Please note: Alyssa and Angie should be switched. Thanks Alyssa.
]]>Stephen Crane
1899
Finally I have a real site. Its in East Biloxi as I always intended it to be. The image above shows its southern end - a block and a half of real estate empty of houses that can be realistically developed together. The back story on the land is that it was purchased by a high end developer shortly after the storm on the assumption that Biloxi would be developed entirely into New Urbanist condos in support of the casino strip after the storm (they didn't make that idea up - it was pretty clearly laid out in the Living Cities plan published for the city about a year after the storm). Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for East Biloxi that isn't going to happen. So now they are stuck with this land, for which they grossly overpaid, and are trying to get rid of it. The EBCRC is trying to buy it from them and in default of that the GCCDS is coming up with alternative development plans for the the property to prevent them from trying to implement their own (which was to divide it up into the smallest lots imaginable and sell really high). The studio suggested rezoning it and plating out duplexes and singles with accessory dwelling units. I will simply suggest a multi family alternative. It probably won't be chosen but ... at least I can throw it in the hat. And I'm doing what I wanted to do since settling on Biloxi - a realistic project on a real site that might be useful for the future. Whether or not they build anything on this site, Biloxi will need a new model for elevated multi unit development. And I'll be able to turn this over to the GCCDS for their records. SO GREAT! Oh, and here, the GCCDS plan just for the record. Download file
]]>Medgar Evers once said “I love Mississippi. I choose not to live anywhere else. I don’t know if I’m going to heaven or hell, but I’m going from Jackson.”
Mississippi a state in 1817, the 20th in the union.
BlackPop:
of 82 counties, 22 are more than 50% black. In 1940 the whole state was more than 50% black but the “decline in black population since then is testimony to the out-migration that lasted until the 1970’s.”
“To comprehend Mississippi, the outlander and native alike must recognize that it is still an emphatically white/black society, and that its white people and black people are deeply bound together – and, together, to the land.”
So Much More. Including the cold hard facts on why Biloxi is such a gambling centre, and why my disapproval is going to do absolutely nothing in the world to change that. Its good for me to read, anyway.
It is also a “land of ghosts: the vanished Indians.” Mississippi was once populated by the ancestors of the Chickasaw, the Choctaw and the Natchez, as well as the Yazoo, Choula, Algonquin, Tunica, Biloxi Sacchuma, Alimamu, and Pascagoula. Now, most of what remains of those people is seen in what Morris calls the “mysterious lost euphonious litany,” of place names. Biloxi means “first people.”
“Elizabeth Spencer begins her memoir On the Gulf: ‘If I could have one part of the world back the way it used to be, I would not choose Dresden before the firebombing, Rome before Nero, or London before the blitz. I would not resurrect Babylon, Carthage or San Francisco. Let the leaning tower lean and the hanging gardens hang. I want the Mississippi Gulf Coast back as it was before Hurricane Camille.”
“Legislation allowing casinos was passed in 1990, but it was close (by two votes in the state senate), and permits gambling establishments to be located on ly on certain bodies of water – the Gulf of Mexico and along the Mississippi River. Federal law permits gambling on Indian reservations in those states where gambling is sanctioned. Now, a decade later, Mississippi is the second-biggest gaming state in the country, trailing only Nevada, and gambling (or “gaming,” as it is euphemistically called) constitutes a major new tax base and source of construction growth; the state levies an 8 percent tax on gaming revenue, and the local municipalities in the nine gambling counties tax at 4 percent. In 1998 state government received $250 million in casino taxes and the localities $65 million, and those figures are steadily rising. The tax monies from casinos, which flow into the state’s general fund, amount to almost 10 percent of the state’s budget. Though, as with tobacco money, there is no plan specifying how exactly these monies must be used, they have funded, among other things, the construction of highways, university buildings, and mental health facilities, as well as teacher pay increases.”
“… of one thing w can rest assured: with nearly a billion dollars in wages and taxes entering the state economy every year, as a legislative lobbyist says, “Demon gamblin’ ain’t ever gonna go away. You can bet on it.” The gambling business is certain to gain more political influence as time passes, although, as one strongly pro-casino legislator sanguinely assures us, it will never be as influential as the farm bureau and the Baptist Church.”
“Of the Gulf Coast’s twelve casinos, nine are in Biloxi. The newest, called Beau Rivage, opened in 1999 at the cost of over $650 million, including $3.5 million in landscaping alone. It is the largest hotel in the South, and that includes the ones in Atlanta and the New Orleans Hilton. It has 1,780 custom guest rooms with marble baths, 66 suites, 12 restaurants, a marina for yachts and sports-fishing boats, a 30,000-square-foot convention center, a grand ballroom and outdoor pavilion, a special Mediterranean-style gambling area, shops, and a spa.”
“The state remains at the nadir in education – fiftieth in America in total expenditures for elementary and secondary students, fiftieth in percentage of high school graduates, fiftieth in salaries for its university teachers, and, most disturbingly of all, fiftieth in overall child development programs that would benefit those in their early years, a period judged by the experts to be absolutely critical, at a time when technological advances demand as never before that the young be educated and trained and counseled for the challenging and complicated future. To me, this reality amounts to nothing less than a societal death wish.”
“Mississippi ranks first among American states in the percentage of its people living below the poverty line: one citizen in every five. It is fiftieth in per capita income (fifty-first if Washington, DC is included) and fiftieth in both median family income and disposable personal income.”
Our state ranks last in the country in literacy. Regarding citizens twenty-five years of age and older, it is last in percentage of high school graduates and forty-eighty in persons twenty-five years or older with college degrees.” note this was in 2000 – is it still true?
Due to the prevalence of communication by train, mail, telephone and telegraph during the _________, not to mention the pervasive influence of plan books, house styles began to be universal across the country and less subject to regional variations. Even the Georgian influence had been most notable on the East Coast and common in other parts of the country only in homes of the upper class. Victorian styles, on the other hand, were relatively uniform throughout the US.
The second half of the nineteenth century had seen upper and middle class households engaging in, “a complex lifestyle that involved rooms for special uses, large flatware and china services with many specialized pieces, and numerous furnishings designed for special needs.” Although this had been de rigueur among the wealthy, in the early Victorian period a combination of affordable goods, produced with Industrial Revolution technology, and immigrant labor as domestic help made the formal lifestyle available to most of society from the lower middle class up.
It was not uncommon for a middle class home to boast any or all of the following specialty rooms: “music rooms, reception rooms, conservatories, sitting rooms and butler’s pantries”, as well as one or two small bedrooms for live in servants.
Oh, don't worry ... it continues. On, to find out more about the death of porch living and "earth closets" keep on keepin' on!
Volz traces the decline of the functionality of a front porch to the increased noise of traffic associated with the advent of the car. “As automobiles became the transportation of choice, the noise the generated caused the decline of the front porch as an outdoor living area. With the advent of sun rooms and other indoor/outdoor living areas on the side of the house, only a token small entry porch remained at the front door.” By the 1950’s the function of the porch as outdoor living space for the family had been removed to the back of the house and reincarnated as the patio.
The entry hall is a good example of changing house plans and the social meanings they carried. In the Georgian or Federal house, the area associated with the front entrance was a long hall which “completely bisected, and was the central axis of, a very symmetrical floor plan.” What did this mean for living? The Victorian entrance hall was more likely to be an asymmetrically located small room immediately around the area of the front door. The main stair hall was still central but no longer opened into the back of the house. In more expensive variations it housed an elaborate formal stair and even a small sitting area, perhaps with a fireplace. There would then be a back stair used by servants. The entrance hall-room allowed visitors to the house to be controlled – domestic servants could filter out undesirable guests while the family remained undisturbed in a parlor at the back of the house. This social divisiveness was expressed in the highly segregated plans of Victorian houses but it was only possible through the plentitude of cheap domestic labor. By the early twentieth century the appeal of factory work (which gave both more money and more freedom) and the near halt of immigration reduced the pool of domestic help to the point where few but the wealthiest families could support the lifestyle required by Victorian houses.
The American Woman’s Home, which included chapters on The Christian Family, A Christian House, Healthful Drinks, Cleanliness, Clothing, Good Cooking, Early Rising, Domestic Manners, Good Temper in the Housekeeper, Habits of System and Order, etc etc as well as more specifically architectural advice was a guide intended to be an instructional manual for a woman running her own home.
The book provides descriptions of daily activities and helpful advice on everything from cleaning stains off marble to caring for sick children to ‘earthclosets’ and their proper maintenance. But it also gives a fairly specific description of the proper “Christian House,” which is according to Beecher, “a house contrived for the express purpose of enabling every member of a family to labor with the hands for the common good and by modes at once healthful, economical and tasteful.” It is not a book of architecture, it is a recipe for appropriate living and the chapter on the Christian home bounces back and forth from images, descriptions and dimensions of the floor plan to organizational layouts for the food in the pantry and descriptions of how to hang pictures in the front hall.
More important than the specifics that Beecher gives regarding the architecture is simply the level of specificity. The implication is that there is an appropriate way to each of the things she describes and that all housekeepers should strive to meet it. Beecher’s stated goal was to increase the importance of a woman’s role in the world by treating it as profession of equal status with those of men. Accordingly, she wished to detail a rigidly detailed system of guidelines which could be used to judge this new profession of womanhood. In the process Beecher was affirming and reinforcing the increasing complexity of life (of entire lifestyles and not just of home designs) which was manifest in the Victorian manner of building and using houses.
Here's the fun: Download file
]]>Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;--
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
]]>Snowflakes
Not slowly wrought, nor treasured for their form,
In heaven, but by the blind self of the storm --
Spun off, each driven individual,
Perfected in the moment of its fall...
-- Howard Nemerov
Here's what I've been working on lately. I've added lot of material (and organization) to the development of housing section, pretended to add a lot to program and put in a fair amount of site material (to which I intend to add more soon). Also I organized the whole thing into a new format which meets both university guidelines and my approval. Its cosmetic but it makes me feel more like I've got something real to work with here. So ... read it, love it, ttyl.
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