163 posts tagged with home.
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Dressing your home for comfort and style
The Material: How can the use of textiles support sustainable coolth and warmth throughout the year?
Traditional Polish house clothes in The Clothed Home by Aleksandra Kędziorek from E-Flux After Comfort. [more inside]
Young Chinese Love Everything About Sweden. Except Living There.
After years working in China’s finance industry, Helen Wang was feeling on the edge of burnout. She was fed up with working grueling hours, then being expected to be on call during her precious time off. The 28-year-old wanted to find a new path: one where she could “lie flat” for a while.Then, a friend gave her a left-field suggestion: move to Sweden. On Chinese social media, Scandinavia is often portrayed as a socialist utopia — a place where women’s rights are respected, parents of young children receive lavish support, and the working culture is relatively relaxed. What better place to start over? [more inside]
Builder's Remedy: San Fransokyo, Part Deux (Electric Boogaloo)
Bay Area Cities To Lose ALL Housing Zoning Powers [today; thread] - "Old law proposes to turn the Bay Area's zoning system into something like Japan's in just two days."[1,2,3,4,5] (previously) [more inside]
Factors determining a spider's politeness
These are the (mostly harmless) Spiders in Your House. Travis McEnery has posted three videos so far, about the most common spider species found in some American homes: cellar spiders, common house spiders, and yellow sac spiders. He also talks about how each rates in three "politeness" areas: webs, movement, and biteyness (spoiler: none are that dangerous). [more inside]
Parks replace downtown freeways
The U.S. city of the future - "What does the city of the future look like in the USA? Let's take a trip to Any City, USA of the mid 21st century. With a look at the existing situation, current trends, and recent government policy, let's take a look at where we'll work, how we'll get around, and where and who we'll live with in the coming decades." [more inside]
Pretend there's a point to wandering around a rock orbiting a dying star
Is There a Way Out of Hawaii's Housing Crisis? - "The Aloha State is drowning in a flood of the same factors creating a housing crisis all over America. It will either become a model for solutions or a cautionary tale." [more inside]
Welcome to cluttercore
While I was scrolling deep in the trenches of TikTok one morning, I had a visceral reaction to a video—with what I can only describe as chaotic good energy—about a design trend called “cluttercore.” Taking off during the pandemic, the hashtag has reached 49.6 million views on TikTok (and 23,703 tags on Instagram), and spawned more videos than any of my devices can load. I honestly had a hard time looking away from my screen because I saw so much of myself within this aesthetic. From Sydney Gore in Architectural Digest. See also Vanessa Brown's piece for The Conversation and Olivia Harvey's take for Apartment Therapy.
Cities and Cities
Why Tokyo Works - "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."[1,2,3] (via) [more inside]
On singleness, self-sufficiency and masculinity
There is no real guidebook for a woman alone in her home. No one threw me a shower. To give me pots and pans. The ones I’d left behind and couldn’t afford to replace. No one to give me hammers and socket wrenches. No one told me about furnace filters or gutter cleaning or caulking. There was only me and a house and a vast gap of knowledge. Single homeowner Lyz Lenz thanks the dads of YouTube. [more inside]
The Innovation of Modular Housing: How Buildings Learn Pattern Languages
Apartments Built on an Assembly Line [ungated] - "The pandemic put a general crimp in housing construction, but made a California factory that churns out prefabricated housing extra busy."[1,2] [more inside]
Design so dreadful you’ll be scarred for life
By the end of episode two, your Changing Rooms bingo card will be full to overflowing. There are room dividers, MDF panelling and feature walls. There is “colour!” being used to create “zones!” There is pink used in a room whose owner hates pink. There is spray-painting, “customising” (making plain, acceptable things into ornate, crappy things), gold leaf, and sticking flooring to walls in the name of innovation. I could go on, but I care about you. The Guardian's Lucy Mangan reviews the latest season of Changing Rooms, a home decor show on Channel 4 in the UK.
rewriting queerness and rural culture
"The spring before I left for a summer job in Colorado and then college in Montana, Dad and I went turkey hunting. He proudly photographed me in PapPap’s old cotton camo fatigues buttoned to the collar and my bad small-town pixie cut, holding a 12-gauge shotgun and a turkey decoy. Today when I look at that turkey-hunting photo, I see someone who was trying to reconcile two seemingly disparate cultures; I’m proud, now, to recognize a kid who was already one very queer redneck." Sarah Keller on Hunting for themself in the high Montana sagebrush, celebrating a new vision of queerness and rural culture.
Old and Interesting
Antique household equipment, furnishings, utensils - housekeeping as part of social history. Domestic life, household management - how people ran their homes and did the daily chores. Yesterday's everyday objects are today's antiques or museum pieces, making us curious about past ways of life. Old & Interesting takes a look at how these everyday things were used, how people managed their home life - and more.
Singapore-style sustainable, managed housing-based wealth-building in US
Why Singapore Has One of the Highest Home Ownership Rates - "Singapore's affordable housing program worked so well that some of its subsidized apartments now resell for more than $700,000." (via) [more inside]
"Something undeniably true"
Betraying my hometown. The great Chinese author Yan Lianke reflects on a changing relationship with home. From his memoir Three Brothers, translated by Carlos Rojas and excerpted in the Paris Review.
Home Cooking Without Going Crackers
“Eater at Home is the source for anyone who wants to feel deeply engaged with food and dining culture, which now, more than ever, is in our homes. Of course, dining culture has never been limited to restaurant spaces and restaurant food; it’s about feeding our curiosity toward new experiences (including, for some of us, consistently cooking at home for the first time).“ How To Stock A Pantry - Pantry Cooking 101 - Getting Started With Sourdough - How A Recipe Developer Organizes Her Fridge - and more.
Everything In America That’s Not A Pyramid Scheme Is A Cult
“ LuLaRoe is now facing a $49 million lawsuit from its old supplier (LuLaRoe countersued the supplier for $1 billion) and a class-action lawsuit from angry customers alleging they were sold defective clothing they couldn’t return. Another $4.5 million lawsuit was filed in California in November 2019 on behalf of a group of consultants, who are alleging LuLaRoe is running an illegal pyramid scheme. The state of Washington is also suing the company for operating a pyramid scheme. Last fall, the company laid off all 167 workers in their Corona, California, warehouse and permanently closed it.” Millennial Women Made LuLaRoe Billions. Then They Paid The Price. (Buzzfeed News)
Houses with names
Welcome to the first edition of the McMansion Hell Yearbook - a year by year account of how the McMansion came to be. We begin our tour of time in the year 1970.
that's just how it tastes
"Maybe meeting a new flavor is alchemy. Today, you can’t stand it. Tomorrow, it’s all you can stand. At home, using books like Sohui Kim’s “Korean Home Cooking,” I cooked stews. Minced garlic. Read about blending the flavors—combining chilies and anchovies until the spice bloomed the way that I liked, simmering until the heat of the red pepper was present without screaming. It was a privilege, I guess, growing to care so deeply about something that had nothing to do with my life. Only now, it did." Bryan Washington wrote and filmed about learning to make Soondubu Jiggae for the New Yorker.
21-Year Old WWII Soldier’s Sketchbooks Are Visual Diary of War
Little Green Houses For You And Me
"In a theoretical Green New Deal, both zero-energy and passive-house standards could be implemented to ensure that all new construction would be ecologically sustainable. Advancements in architectural thinking and building construction—limiting the use of unsustainable, energy inefficient, and carbon-intensive building materials such as glass curtain walls, concrete, and building materials derived from petroleum, and increasing the use of consumer technologies like composting toilets—could further reduce architecture’s carbon footprint. Architecture already has the means and technology to make this happen. It also happens that the results look good." How A Green New Deal Could Transform Our Homes (Curbed)
The People Who Love to Watch Other People Clean
The world is a mess. “Cleanfluencers” are here to help. [The Atlantic]
Meet the 'cleanfluencers', the online gurus who like things nice and tidy. [The Guardian] [more inside]
“There are many risks in the home”
Life Gave Me Fifteen Lemons
"I got fifteen lemons in the mail from a California friend with a lemon tree. This is what I did with them." An illustrated essay by MeFi's Own jessamyn (further story background on mefi projects). Includes secret messages, ideas for a lemon menagerie, and a variety of foods/meals. Also features community, and friends near and far. 🍋
Even growing in a filthy pond, the white lotus never gets dirty.
In the great inland city of Chongqing in southwest China, as aerial tramways arced overhead and the towers of the wealthy loomed, French filmmaker Hendrick Dusollier documented the Last Days in Shibati (十八梯) slum before it was demolished. [more inside]
Eat the rich. Please.
Thousands of New Millionaires Are About to Eat San Francisco Alive. SF is already known for having some of the highest rents in the US (although some would disagree, it's still solidly in ridiculous territory). It's long been well known that you can make six figures and still be low income, and that it's cheaper to rent than buy here. Studies confirm that thanks to the expected IPO spate this year, it's about to get worse for those not benefiting from an influx of cash.
"this is the most canadian video i think i’ve ever watched"*
The affable owner of an antiques shop in Edmonton travels to a rural town on the Saskatchewan-Alberta border to seek items in a 100-year-old hoarder's house, once the home of a talented Canadian potter-artist ... and decides to purchase the entire property, initiating an epic indoor excavation-exploration and tracking his laborious progress in arctic conditions on Youtube as he painstakingly makes his way through literal tons of accumulated trash and the occasional treasure. [more inside]
Bright lights, small city
Panopticism
Airbnb and the commodification of home - "What does this to do our relationships with one another? When every interaction becomes a rateable exchange, we can no longer just be two humans holding a conversation: we are conducting a business transaction in which your ‘communication’ will be given a score out of five."
Revitalizing Small Town America
How to Save the Troubled American Heartland - "Some places can't be rescued. Those that can need help from business, government and nonprofits." [more inside]
Loss in property value due to sea level rise and flooding
Sea level rise already causing billions in home value to disappear - "A recent slew of studies show how the housing market is responding to the increasing risk of coastal flooding — with billions in value disappearing as investors wake up to the systemic risk." [more inside]
No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark.
The deeply-personal Home, by British-Somali poet Warsan Shire, has become a rallying call for refugees and their advocates. Listen to her read it.
An earlier version of the poem, Conversations About Home (at a deportation centre), featured an unusual typographical style. Watch her read it. [CW: sexual abuse]
the tyranny of structurelessness
"A flowing, connected interior—once a fringe experiment of American architectural modernism—has become ubiquitous, and beloved. But it promises a liberation from housework that remains a fantasy." [more inside]
googie dingbats and bungalow YIMBYs
All this over $569
In 83 Million Eviction Records, a Sweeping and Intimate New Look at Housing in America - "A Princeton sociologist chronicled the human toll of eviction in one city in a 2016 book. A new project may reveal just how widespread the problem is." [more inside]
Vampire capital, undead labor, toxic assets, and possessed houses
“Gothic Marxism then allows for these texts (Paranormal Activity, Insidious, Sinister, The Purge, Get Out) to be interpreted as sites of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled but solutions to the concerns and material anxieties to which they respond and draw from seem far less evident. The shadow of the crash earlier this century is still haunting popular culture as the development and persistence of these films concerned with the issue of housing goes to prove. Furthermore, these cultural expressions of anxiety reflect the persisting material and political issues still plaguing the ways in which capitalist society handles the question of housing. “ - Your Home May Be Repossessed if You Do Not Keep Up With Your Payments: A Marxist Approach to Post-Recession Horror Film, Jon Greenaway. [more inside]
"We nerds have heart and depth too..."
"Domestic conversion - the metamorphosis of a jetliner into a home" just one of the many sections of the FAQ of airplanehome.com the site Bruce Campbell created to explain how he converted a Boeing 727 and turned it into his home. Too many words? Just watch this short video tour. [via]
Utopia Now!
Meagan Day writes about five experimental Utopias in US history for Timeline - Bible Communists embrace free love in Oneida, NY - Kansas’ octagon obsessed vegetarians - Socialist loggers in the Sierra Nevadas railroaded by capitalism - Home, Washington was red, nude and without rules - All One Farm grows apples, drops acid, and eventually poisons millions.
‘Tiny House Hunters’ and the shrinking American dream
It all started with House Hunters, an HGTV franchise where couples, generally in terrible marriages, pretend to look for a new home even though to appear on the show, the participants must have already purchased a new home.
When I am sitting on my couch, probably pretending to work, there is something soothing about the implausible yet aspirational sheen of this show where everyone wants an open floorplan and ground-floor master bedroom with en suite bathroom and ceiling fans they can swing from or whatever.
Roxane Gay for Curbed.
Clean Up, Clean Up, Everybody Everywhere
Stop. Drop the sponge and step away from the microwave. Scientists have determined that there's really no good way to clean a kitchen sponge. Stock up now!
The infamous practice of contract selling is back in Chicago
50 years ago, when African-Americans on Chicago's South and West sides weren't able to get mortgages due to redlining, a predatory practice called contract selling sprung up. Later, during the sub-prime heyday, these neighborhoods were targeted with sub-prime mortgages. Now, after credit tightening due to the mortgage crisis in 2008, contract selling has returned and continues to prey on disadvantaged neighborhoods. [more inside]
Yes. It is as bad as you'd think.
Girls and Boys Alone. Channel 4 Special! oh, oh... Childcare experts and politicians feared that the series, which saw eight-to-11-year-olds fend for themselves for two weeks, would degenerate into "voyeuristic and low-grade entertainment" and what happened -- -pretty much panned out as thought.
***Parent Trigger Warning*** [more inside]
***Parent Trigger Warning*** [more inside]
Fruits just want have fun
Home is where the art is
“'Someone very dear to me once said, ‘When I’m in your house or at the Rancho, I feel like I’m walking around inside of your body.’ I love that he didn’t say ‘mind,’ because I don’t create with my head. I create with my heart,” [Sheila Youngblood] says. “What I wear, what my spaces look and feel like—these are expressions of my own heart, and inviting people into a space where you can feel the love and the soulfulness is my goal. It’s an invitation into something deeper. It’s gratifying, inspiring, and undeniably real.'” From Texas Monthly, a lovely photo essay: The Most Colorful House in Texas. [more inside]
Kind of like putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier in the same room
San Fransokyo
Why Tokyo is the land of rising home construction but not prices - "The city had more housing starts in 2014 than the whole of England. Can Japan's capital offer lessons to other world cities?" (via) [more inside]
"We have made a stunning discovery..."
Archaeological evidence has emerged to reveal that the previously-thought home of the fifth President of the United States, James Monroe, in Albemarle County, Virginia, was actually a guest house and that Monroe's Highland was something far more grand. [more inside]
Is Staying In The New Going Out?
These days, we respond to the question [how was your weekend] with a look of puzzled amnesia. Did we do anything? “Not really,” we say. “It was pretty uneventful.” We furrow our brows trying to remember key events, but nothing comes to mind. It’s as though the last two days have elapsed in a narcotized, undifferentiated blur. A leisure-time blackout. We still have fun — probably? — we just have no clue how it happened. [slnyt]