Good form........................

 

Good artists are people who can stick things together so that they stay stuck. They know how to gather things into formal arrangements that are intelligible, memorable, and lasting. Good forms confer health upon the things that they gather together. Farms, families and communities are forms of art just as are poems, paintings and symphonies. None of these things would exist if we did not make them. We can make them either well, or poorly; this choice is another thing that we make.

-Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

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The deadening effect...............................

 

..............................of managerialism:

Managerialism is a form of political economy in which the middle-man steps in with a claim that he has some special competence, through the exercise of which new efficiencies can be realized, or some process of production or distribution can be optimized through quantitative rigor. But a funny thing then happens. His metrics easily come detached from the underlying things they are meant to track, no doubt because the incentives of the manager are tied to metrics, rather than directly to the thing. The latter orientation is characteristic of the craftsman, via the “internal rewards” and satisfactions that are intrinsic to some skilled practice (such as making good television), as opposed to the “external rewards” of money, or social position, or other goods that may be a second-order consequence of getting to be really good at something. But you can’t get good at something while focused on external rewards. You have to go deep into the practice itself.

-Matthew B. Crawford

rooting against the status quo..........

 

But roughly every 120 years, global leadership shifts hands.

Why? Because success breeds complacency. Great societies, like great countries and companies, eventually get comfortable. They ride on the coattails of their success. They offshore everything to developing countries because they have the luxury of prioritizing returns and efficiency over resilience. It’s easy to chase lower costs abroad when the threats seem far away. But when it matters most, these societies find they’ve lost the capacity to build anything that counts.

-Chris Power, as culled from here

a good guess....................

So there's my guess at a set of principles to live by: take care of people and the world, and make good new things.

-Paul Graham

smarts..................................

 

I make progress by having people around me who are smarter than I am and listening to them.  And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.

-Henry J. Kaiser

a deep necessity.........................

 

A fundamental fact about human beings is that we are homo faber, as Hannah Arendt said.  We make stuff.  Doing so seems to express a deep necessity we have to point to something visible in the world and say, "I did that."

-Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

Art..............................

One of the more interesting aspects of the Old School is the former boiler room.  From the beginning it had the potential for "cool."   The puzzle was how to deliver it.   After several go-rounds with our architect, we settled on a design that we hoped would elicit a "wow" reaction.  The jury is still out.  The rest of the building is almost complete.  Plans are for the first tenant to move in August 1.  The former boiler room, which has its own private entrance, is trailing.  We are at least a month away from finishing it.   The space has many unique features.  One of the most significant is its size:  1,800 square feet.  Another is the multiple levels.   Multiple levels require staircases.  Staircases require railings.   Railings can be cool.  At least we hope so.

Rough framing of the staircase to the second bedroom.  Wooden rails are only
temporary, for safety purposes.  Likewise the support posts.  Ultimately, the
staircase will be supported from the roof structure, not the floor.

Having your main man be handy with welding and working with metal
is a definite plus

About halfway finished with the railing.  Rather than spindles
(building codes do not allow for open railings in residential
units), half-inch glass panels will be fitted in between the posts.  

The most important thing.............

...........................................................................is to pass it on.





thanks greg

Good more of this would be...........

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... the necessary thing......................

“It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.” 
-Abraham Maslow

We could talk for hours.........................

..............and not get to all the factors influencing these charts.

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The future looks bright.................................

“Sometimes when I reflect on all the beer I drink, I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. I think, 'It is better to drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver.” 
-Attibuted to, but probably not said by, Babe Ruth

Opening paragraphs.................................

In an era when nearly every college president bore a triple-barreled name, none carried as potent a charge as Nicholas Murray Butler.  To his intimates the president of Columbia University was "Murray";  to the associates who saw him found the school's Teachers College in 1887 at the age of twenty-five he was "Nicholas Miraculous."  His employees simply called him President (when they didn't refer to him as "Czar Nicholas"), his acquaintances, Doctor.  The editors of Life named him "one of the most erudite men of his time."  None of this necessarily contradicted Senator Robert M. La Follette, who said Butler was a "bootlicker of men of fortune."  Theodore Roosevelt was even blunter:  he considered him "an aggressive and violent ass."
-Daniel Okrent,  Great Fortune:  The Epic of Rockefeller Center

Opening paragraphs......................

In the summer of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure:  a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of ground and containing within its airy vastness enough room for four St. Paul's Cathedrals.  For the short time of its existence, it was the biggest building on Earth.  Known formally as the Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, it was incontestably magnificent, but all the more so for being so sudden, so startlingly glassy, so gloriously and unexpectedly there.  Douglas Jerrold, a columnist for the weekly magazine Punch, dubbed it the Crystal Palace, and the name stuck.
-Bill Bryson,  At Home:  A Short History of Private Life

Paxton's Crystal Palace.........................

Paxton's first sketch

Opening paragraphs.................

There was a time when I assumed that becoming a master craftsman would be a process of enlightenment.  My hands were still ignorant then, and I was searching for an occupation in which I could forge an adult self.  Eager for competence, I thought that having one's craft together would mean having one's life together.  Today, having become reasonable competent as a furniture maker, I know better.  Spiritual enlightenment is not on the table.  Still, the notions that drew me to the workshop forty years ago were not without consequence.  The footing on which I started my journey has shaped my choices, concerns, and experiences throughout, and my transcendent expectations for a life in craft were rewarded in more palpable ways.
-Peter Korn,  Why We Make Things and Why It Matters:  The Education of a Craftsman

Build...................................

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
-Tom Asacker, The Business of Belief:  How the World's Best Marketers, Designers, Salespeople, Coaches, Fundraisers, Educators, Entrepreneurs and Other Leaders Get Us To Believe

Economic development............................

Faithful readers will remember recent posts about Southgate Corporation's development of yet another speculative 50,000 square foot industrial building (here and here).  I had the good fortune to be invited to the announcement ceremony for the new tenant for that building this past Thursday.  Xperion, a German company, will be occupying the building upon its completion in the Spring.  They and their fifty some employees with be manufacturing carbon fiber composite cylinders for storing and dispensing compressed natural gas.   With Ohio benefiting from the shale gas bonanza, there are great hopes that more and more vehicles will soon be powered by natural gas instead of gasoline.  These cylinders will be part of that shift.  This is a really big deal for our community.  It was a team effort, so a big THANK YOU to all who made this possible.

An aggressive building schedule (winter is coming to Ohio) has
 the tilt-up walls in place before the ground breaking ceremony took place.

The happy announcement.  Welcome Xperion!

One of the products soon to be made in Ohio

Bet you didn't know this.................

     One central characteristic of the Model T now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver's seat on the left hand side.  Previously, nearly all manufacturers placed the driver on the outer, curb-side of the car so that an alighting driver could step out onto a grassy verge or dry sidewalk rather than into the mud of an unpaved road.  Ford reasoned that this convenience might be better appreciated by the lady of the house, and so arranged seating for her benefit.  The arrangement also gave the driver a better view down the road, and made it easier for passing drivers to stop and have a conversation out facing windows.  Ford was no great thinker, but he did understand human nature.  Such, in any case, was the popularity of Ford's seating plan for the Model T that it soon became the standard adopted by all cars.
-Bill Bryson,   One Summer:  America, 1927

The Things to do...................

"The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual."
-Buckminster Fuller, as excerpted from a letter to "Micheal" (16 February 1970).  Micheal was a 10 year old boy who had inquired in a letter as to whether Fuller was a "doer" or a "thinker".

cartoon via