Artfully Planned Ambience

"Children of Admiral" by jagerBB on flickr

Download file
"Boy with a coin he found in the weeds
With bullets and pages of trade magazines
Close to a car that flipped on the turn
When God left the ground to circle the world

A girl with a bird she found in the snow
Then flew up her gown and that's how she knows
That God made her eyes for crying at birth
Then left the ground to circle the Earth

A boy with a coin he crammed in his jeans
Then making a wish he tossed in the sea
Walked to a town that all of us burn
When God left the ground to circle the world."

-- Iron & Wine "Boy with a Coin"

Download file
"Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You...you may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You...you may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will live as one"

-- John Lennon "Imagine"

Numbers

30&6,000,000,000&1 -- "More than 30 per cent of children in developing countries – about 600 million – live on
less than US $1 a day."

3.6&5 -- "Every 3.6 seconds one person dies of starvation. Usually it is a child under the age of 5."

100,000,000 -- "One than 1 billion children are severely deprived of at least one of the essential goods and services they require to survive, grow and develop."

13,000,000&17&39 -- "Nearly 13 million children in the United States—17% of all children—live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level. Research shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice that level to cover basic expenses. Using this standard, 39% of children live in low-income families."

?,000,000 -- "In China, millions of children are out of school for a wide variety of reasons.

23,650,000 -- "At the end of 2007, China had 23.65 million Children living below the poverty line."

? -- But the Children in China are only a small percentage of the children who are suffering from poverty and hunger across the world.

"Poverty in Canada" by Su Bee on flickr

Facts

Poverty hits children hardest. Most of the people living in poverty are children. Poverty denies children their rights. It weakens a child's protective environment, as much abuse and exploitation of children is linked to widespread and deeply entrenched poverty. It blights their lives with ill health, malnutrition, and impaired physical and mental development. It saps their energy and undermines their confidence in the future. No society has ever seen a broad-based reduction in poverty without major and sustained investments in the rights of its people to health, nutrition and basic education.

143 million children under five in the developing world continue to suffer from inadequate nutrition. The highest numbers are in south Asia, where over half the under-fives (54%) were underweight in 1990, but there is progress in this region, with the proportion falling to 46% by 2006. Asia, the second poorest part of the globe, has seen a drop from 41.1% living below the poverty line to 29.5% by 2004. However there have been no such gains in sub-Saharan Africa. If progress continues to be this slow and patchy, the 2015 target will be missed by a margin of 30 million children.

According to the UNICEF report, more than 85% of primary school-age children are now receiving a basic education, although the figure drops to 70% in eastern and southern Africa and just 62% in west and central Africa. Between 2002 and 2005, the number of children out of school dropped from 115 million to 93 million, and of those still without a school place 41 million live in sub-Saharan Africa and a further 31.5 million live in south Asia.

Actual attendance rates tend to be lower than enrollment rates. In eastern Africa, for example, fewer than three out of five children attend primary school, and UNICEF says that some of those are pupils of secondary school age who have started their education late or are retaking grades. For countries nearing universal primary education, UNICEF says that reaching the last 10% of children out of school is a "particular challenge".

Many people mistakenly assume that child poverty is a challenge only people in developing countries are facing. This is sadly untrue. In Canada, the situation of child poverty has gone from bad to worse. UNICEF’s report on Child Poverty in developed countries ranks Canada near the bottom for children’s well-being, at 17 out of 23 countries. This is unacceptable for a country that prides itself on being consistently chosen as the best place in the world to live.

“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.�In 2006, 17.4 percent of children in America lived below the poverty line, substantially more than in 1969. And even this measure probably understates the true depth of many children’s misery. Living in or near poverty has always been a form of exile, of being cut off from the larger society. But the distance between the poor and the rest of us is much greater than it was 40 years ago, because most American incomes have risen in real terms while the official poverty line has not. To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child’s brain.

Beginning prior to birth, poor children experience more health problems than their non-poor counterparts, even after adjusting for potentially confounding factors. Controlling for mothers' age, education, marital status, and smoking status, women with incomes below the federally established poverty line were found to be 80 percent more likely to bear an infant at low birth weight (2500 grams or less) than women whose incomes remained above the poverty line. Children born at a low birth weight are at risk for negative outcomes well into their childhoods. Compared to full-term children, neurologically intact very-low-birth-weight children (1500 grams or less) present more impairments in arithmetic, motor and spatial skills, language, and memory, and perform worse on measures of achievement. Children with birth weights of less than 1000 grams are at the highest risk. One study revealed that 34 percent of low-birth-weight children were either repeating grades or placed in special education classrooms in school; only 14 percent of normal-birth-weight children experienced the same outcomes.

"Central Station"

"Central Station" is one of my favorite films all the time. In this Brazilian film, Dora is a retired schoolteacher who makes ends meet by sitting at the station writing letters for illiterate people. Suddenly she has an opportunity to pocket $1,000. All she has to do is persuade a homeless 9-year-old boy to follow her to an address she has been given. (She is told he will be adopted by wealthy foreigners.) She delivers the boy, gets the money, spends some of it on a television set and settles down to enjoy her new acquisition. Her neighbor spoils the fun, however, by telling her that the boy was too old to be adopted —he will be killed and his organs sold for transplantation. Perhaps Dora knew this all along, but after her neighbor's plain speaking, she spends a troubled night. In the morning Dora resolves to take the boy back.

Suppose Dora had told her neighbor that it is a tough world, other people have nice new TV's too, and if selling the kid is the only way she can get one, well, he was only a street kid. She would then have become, in the eyes of the audience, a monster. She redeems herself only by being prepared to bear considerable risks to save the boy.

At the end of the movie, in cinemas in the affluent nations of the world, people who would have been quick to condemn Dora if she had not rescued the boy go home to places far more comfortable than her apartment. In fact, the average family in the United States spends almost one-third of its income on things that are no more necessary to them than Dora's new TV was to her. Going out to nice restaurants, buying new clothes because the old ones are no longer stylish, vacationing at beach resorts —so much of our income is spent on things not essential to the preservation of our lives and health. Donated to one of a number of charitable agencies, that money could mean the difference between life and death for children in need.

This film tells me: whenever a kid needs you, you can never ever say no.

Why Should We Care

“Every child deserves a chance. A kid who is living in poverty does not get a fair chance� – Free The Children

When children grow up in poverty, they pay a heavy price. Research shows that they have more illnesses, perform poorly in school, have more mental health problems, and earn less when they are adults.

Research shows that for every $1 that a country invests in giving children a good start in life, the country saves $7 in costs for health and other problems that arise when kids' basic needs are not met. Helping children out of poverty is therefore morally, socially and economically productive.

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action. More often we focus on our little self-centered world but ignore the boy with a coin sitting in the corner. Everyone of us should find a boy with a coin in the dark corner; then give him hope, let him dare to dream his dream and make him smile like an angel.

Posted by yuanx072 at 2:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

" The Vendome Hotel, Minneapolis, MN"

On a mild December day in 1959, a group of Minneapolis officials gathered beneath the ornamented façade of the Hotel Vedome, at the edge of the city's skid row. They were to celebrate hotel's destruction - and to inaugurate a complete remaking of the city's downtown. The Vendome had been landmark enough in 1917 to merit its own page in the Golden Jubilee fifth anniversary history of the city, where it was hailed as "the center of commercial activities of Minneapolis." This illustrious past had been all but forgotten by the late 1950s, however. The Vendome's architectural flourishes - its richly decorated, faux French façade; its columns and carved filigree; its stone crown with the likeness of Lady Liberty carved into it - offended postwar tastes. The Vendome, shabby and unfashionable, had become a worn-out reminder of a past not worth preserving, a relic of the city's olden days.

During the next four years, the rest of skid row followed the Vendome into oblivion. Known commonly as the Gateway district, or Lower Loop, this neighborhood comprised nearly twenty-five blocks centering on the intersection of Hennepin, Washington, and Nicollet Avenues. Like Vendome, the entire district had fallen on hard times. It was a neighborhood of bars, flophouses, pawnshops, and second-hand stores; charity missions and social service agencies; small-time wholesalers and manufacturers; and office buildings that had aged past their prime.

The old men who lived on skid row had served an important role in the region's industrial history. They accounted for the majority of the city's public drunken reality back then. Like the buildings of skid row, they were relics. But by the 1950s, the city planning office commissioned the "Beautiful Entrance to a Beautiful City", in which the slum was ordered to be cleared at the Gateway area. Nevertheless, like the city planning department's earlier plan, the Housing and Redevelopment Authority's included a public component. The relocation committee proposed a special housing project north of Hennepin that would re-create the single-occupancy rooms the men had lived in on skid row. It ws designed to be a safer, cleaner version of skid row, without bars and missions. By April 1961, nearly hlf of the cage hotels and flophouses had been obliterated, accompanied bu an exodus from the Gateway. Some fifteen hundred men collected their scant belongings and left skid row during the first year of demolition. Most of them found housing in nearby downtown neighborhood. By 1962, with 80 percent of the Gateway buildings demolished, the population had shrunk to almost nothing.

While material housing conditions improved for those displaced by the land clearance, relocation officials found that in many cases, the men missed their old life. One man, who had lived in a cage hotel for ten years, complained that although he enjoyed the windows and closets of his new apartment, he couldn't find roast park and applesauce like he'd had on skid row. Indeed, skid row had grown and developed quite specifically to fulfill the needs of this culture. But the workingmen, pensioners, drunkards, and thieves of skid row - their lifestyles and livelihood were inextricably tied to skid row.

"We disturbed their way of life. We were destroying whatever culture existed there: the ability of people to make do."

"There's a part of me that's very sympathetic to drinking too much and pissing on walls"

"Skid row residents look on as their homes and haunts gradually disappear before the wrecking crew."

Posted by yuanx072 at 5:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"A Conceptual Representation of Our Inner Energy"

"The energy in me is tangible, growing..., time changed and reshaped the flows..., both trees and I found shelters in the space..." -- Andy Goldsworthy

Minimalism is already Andy Goldsworthy's choice. His outdoor conceptual art is ephemeral, often consisting of simple and fragile materials such as twigs, leaves, ferns, or ice placed in natural settings with no attempt to protect them from decay and disruption. Each work of him grows, stays and decays. He says, “process and decay are implicit". The energy involved in his works is always melodramatic and sentimental. In his "beehive-like structure of stone" project, the stone was over lapped by the ocean; when the tide of the sea receded, the stone re-emerged to be more isolated and imperfect. The energy of the tides changed both color and shape of the stone, and therefore left a scar during a certain period of time: as a proof of passing on pains from the past to the present, ending at a closure in the future.

As beautiful as many of Mr. Goldsworthy's works are, torture is part of his authentic "character" of works that he wants to bring to his environmental art. But why there are so many pains in the magnificent world of nature in terms of Mr. Goldsworthy's meditation? Those twisted and isolated natural flows are the shelters for him, where he escaped from the greatly urbanized world. However, maybe he could flee the space of floors and ceilings to the space of the ground and horizon; he is never able to overcome the eternity of time. Time changes the existential importance of everything. The flow of time never pauses. That is the reason why we fear the aging, death, and the transformation of the things we've already known by hearts.

I regard myself as the same kind of person as Andy Goldsworthy, who tends to be very conservative to accept rapid changes. Urbanization haters. Totally idealistic and artistic. I lived in Beijing, China for a long when I was little. The only thing I could remember about that gigantic city is the constant noises produced by the constructions of new buildings and tearing down old streets. The sky was forever gray and yellow – they are the colors of steel and clay. Father said to me one day, “We have to get out this disrespectful and murderous city.� Then he told me a story: when the new China was just founded at the year of 1949, there was a nationwide argument about the re-planning of Beijing. Some “leftists� strongly suggested that the new re-planned Beijing should preserve all the ancient architecture and old streets, meanwhile some “rightists� simply wanted to tear down anything “old� to create a “new� Beijing. Liang Sicheng, a famous Chinese architect was one of the leftists, who presented a perfect plan creating a functional and old-fashioned new Beijing without damaging the ancient architecture at all. But his idealistic blueprint was never commissioned by the government. On the day the ancient Forbidden City was tore down, Liang sited at the gateway of Forbidden City, crying helplessly when the monstrous machinery was destroying the 2000-year-old buildings. Pathetically, he could not protect the best architecture of ancient China. It was not only a tragedy of an architect, but also a tragedy of an ancient civilization. This ignorant destruction can be seen as a devastating transformation of a city, which ruined most of the memories and sensations of this old city. I can only imagine the pains Liang was going through. It was a pain caused by the industrialization. It was a pain of the changing time.

No matter how naturalistic I am, I still cannot prevent the natural environment from being urbanized. Nor can Andy Goldsworthy. Urbanism in many ancient cities is inevitable so that the reconstruction of much architecture is unavoidable. Almost all the old cities have suffered or are suffering the rapid transformation like Beijing, Tehran and Istanbul. Compromises have to be made. To concretize the essence of "genius loci" in ever new historical contexts, in terms of architecture and urban plan, is becoming a significant issue. The existential purpose of architecture is therefore to make the balance between natural and urban environments, and to uncover the potential meanings of the urban architecture presented in the given natural environment. Only in this way can "the spirit of the place" be conserved, can the ancient culture be ceaseless, and finally can we overcome the pains of trading the past with the present.

I believe that both architecture and city celebrate the joy of retrieving their lost cultural spirits and natural roots. The energy of architecture and city will be carried on throughout the lives, memories and sensations contained in them. Then their motions will grow humane and permanent.

"The Old Forbidden City, Beijing, China"

"Bavinger House by Bruce Goff, expressed the sense of amalgamation of natural and urban environment"

Posted by yuanx072 at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)