It is my intention to bring a sensibility relating to need to the minute details I am so fond of exploring. For what I meant when I spoke out against waste, I will now discuss. Waste in architecture, wasting of space, is the utilization of space in a manner, and for a purpose that is not a bare requisite to those using it, which specifically disables all other uses that space may be typically able to provide.
Take, specifically, a small, original New England Village, founded 1670, originating with a minor town center surrounded by tobacco farmland.
That is my home's heritage. Today, transportation and communication have left the town core as dead-space, hollow of meaning, home to quaint shops and areas locals know well, but cannot sustain. The areas grown in between these villages now house the centers - large strip malls, not 7 miles away from each other, and not within 7 miles of housing. The areas in between these, are forest. Or were. They are now condominiums and McMansion settlements. And not one of these spaces is in walking distance, and only bikers who truly are dedicated to not paying for gas would use this approach.
In actual numbers, the town center is a 5 minute walk from my home. The mall is a 15-20 minute drive. There is a local grocer in the center of town. The new construction is closer to the mall than to it, but still, never a walk or bike ride. And yet, the current Firehouse and Masonic Lodge (go outdated societies!) have recently been torn down. They are in the town center. They are quite literally directly across from the grocer and a pharmacy, and one block down from town hall. Why the fuck aren't they being reused for something else? We're in the middle of nowhere, so construction without creating an entirely new shell, while potentially more costly in another setting, excludes the sheer transportation of quantity from cost, making an efficient and competitive option. The reuse of any material from one to another is enough to finish a large portion of needed adjustments. As well, the local private high school has recently torn down its main academic center - a building the size of Margaret Morrison, and did so in a "deconstruction" method, permitting reuse of all of its materials. Naturally, it was sold off to the highest bidder, as the school and the town do not get along, but what a peace offering the quantity of raw material could have been.
I propose the creation of a kit-of-parts for a modular basis, which allows the reuse of the abundant materials in the local context, to have recreated the Firehouse and Masonic Lodge, as well as restructuring the town core, in order to accommodate the population occupying the 3 recently developed settlements on the town borders.
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Your desire to help your hometown is an admirable intention and an incredibly relevant problem in contemporary life. Reinvigorating town centers without considering the corporations who have run business out to big box retail may limit your ability in serving the small businesses in this endeavor. Maybe placating Wal-Mart as well as City Hall with an architecture each their own may leave the true heart of the center core to be in line with your personal vision, the crafting sensibilities of which I really appreciate.
ReplyDeleteI would highly recommend you look into the stories of King Solomon's Temple as well as the Tabernacle to make sure you don't offend the affected parties, but even more importantly to perhaps uncover "The Lost Keys of Freemasonry" and just what the Lodge meant a hundred years ago when the global power structure as we know it was just forming. What is it about tradition that the 21st century is incapable of keeping, and where or when did we go wrong? Your selection of a Masonic Lodge as part of your intervention opens up an enormous can of worms in relation to both construction methods as well as heritage... and secret history.