The kickwheel that’s taken up so much of my valuable time the last two months or so is, essentially, fini.

Now if I only knew how to throw.

I’m not a potter, and haven’t ever really considered myself a potter, but being a ceramic artist I am still very interested in functional clay pieces. I used to be at least mediocre using a wheel, but I’ve quickly realized how out of practice I am with this behemoth in my garage.

I started out with the plans found via this link. I modified them as I needed and wanted to, but ended up with pretty much the same thing as the plans picture — a kickwheel that works but is very difficult to get situated into (too much bulky wood on either side of the seat). The following is a rundown of the project starting with a gallery.

The most difficult part of the project, in execution, was the flywheel assembly. The flywheel, shaft, wheel head and bearings took up a significant chunk of research and development, as it were.

The wheel head and shaft I had fabricated by a local machine shop. An aluminum collar with a key slot, and two threaded holes for bolts to go up against the key, was welded to the bottom of the wheel head. The axle is 1″ diameter stainless steel and slotted to receive the key in the collar welded to the wheel head. All of these parts, from what I was told, were from the machine shop’s scrap pile. The owner didn’t charge me in the end, chocking my request up to “a learning experience.” He’d originally planned on getting a piece of 1″ thick aluminum stock to fabricate the wheel head from, but what he gave me in the end was only about 3/8″. It’s not perfect either, but it works.

The bearings took a lot of time to track down. I ended up purchasing one pillow block bearing and one flange bearing from The Big Bearing Store. Both ended up being self-aligning, something I knew I wanted but was too ignorant to go after intentionally. After shipping, they cost about $30. Also note the black wire at the bottom of the back of the finished wheel. This is an extension tube for a grease gun going to the flange bearing underneath the flywheel.

The bearings were secured with 3″ self drilling lag bolts.

The cast concrete flywheel used roughly 180 pounds of [dry] cement. The flywheel was cast in a form made of 1/8″ thick by 7″ wide masonite screwed to a circular piece of 3/4″ thick by 24″ diameter plywood. I cast the thing in place, and before doing so caulked the seams to keep concrete from running down around the bearings (this was probably unnecessary, but I was taking every precaution this first time around). (more…)

This evening I came across a fascinating surface. I’m sharing it with readers here and challenging you to identify it in the comments.

The first person to identify the surface or object the surface is a part of will receive this platter.

Hopefully the platter is appealing to the winner. It’s about nine inches across, a low-fire clay with a commercial celadon glaze. The plate is one of a few like it that I finished this month.

As needed, I may give some hints along the way. I’ll start off by saying that I came across the surface in question in my studio.

My parents downsized a few years ago to a townhouse. Like many such arrangements they are part of a neighborhood association which collects dues and maintains a fairly strict covenant. It’s been a very good move for them in general, in large part so my father wouldn’t have to worry about things like lawn care and snow removal.

Not everyone, not surprisingly, respects the covenant equally however. The couple in the unit adjacent to my parents’ recently installed white replacement windows. The association bylaws explicitly require brown trim around all windows. A year before that, the same couple added new fencing which ties into a nearby fence owned by the middle school, also a violation.

There is recourse written into the covenant, but no one wants to make waves. They have to live next to these people, after all, and litigation isn’t as fun as some people make it out to be. It’s been brought up in meetings and mentioned to the offenders. They feign ignorance in response, make seemingly vacant promises to rectify the issue and then go on with life.

The Architecture of Happiness points out that “The problem with unrestricted choice, however, is that it tends not to lie so far from outright chaos.” The author runs with this them for a number of pages.

Is personal expression at odds with order? Is an eclectic built environment less attractive than a planned, or even just guided, space? Is what differentiates chaos from order merely a matter of personal preference?

These are the kinds of questions The Architecture of Happiness seems to be aiming at as I get a little farther into the book. Being a designer and artist and someone who is keenly aware of his surroundings in general, I undoubtedly tend towards an ordered environment. However, I believe in what might appear to be a middle ground, where variety thrives within a visual program — or where a visual program promotes and directs variety.

Photo from Wikipedia

My postman came to the door with a delivery over lunch yesterday, and as he and I are wont to do we chatted a while. Through unfortunate circumstances he’s ended up with a Timothy Tyler painting. Tyler is a very successful, from what I know of him, Siloam Springs painter.

After lunch I decided to look him up online again, as I couldn’t remember anything he’d done. After a couple minutes browsing his website I ended up on a gallery page full of still lifes. Almost every painting features what appear to be hand-made pots.

Tyler and his wife got themselves into a little trouble last year, something related to credit card fraud and an art workshop in Belfast. Looking at the local paper, follow up stories to that particular incident are here and here.

I little more on the improvisational realism I referred to a couple weeks ago. That post talked about imagining the parts of a storm not visible in the process of making a three-dimensional sculpture.

With this next work — really only the third in this particular vein — I’ve realized that I must make other imaginative decisions even with parts of the thunderstorm depicted in a photograph. In the example above, for instance, the picture shows a bank of wispy clouds trailing off the right side of the anvil, out of the frame. Visually, this isn’t part of the storm structure, so I chose to leave it off.

Similar decisions are being made as a carve along, decisions which at first I regret having to make; the storm is so incredible that I want to render it with equal glory. However, once I get into the piece a little further I’m comfortable with the adjustments that my static medium requires. The dynamic nature of the real-life storm is also reassuring; changes that I make possess the possibility to at least partially reflect what might actually go on in that particular squall.

I’ve thought that other media might serve to better represent clouds, sculpted or cast paper, for instance. Some day I hope to get to those other ideas, but I’m a long way from accomplishing what I hope to in clay right now. Further, the colors and variations of atmospheric firings, such as those in a soda kiln, seem to beautifully mimic the color play on a thunderstorm at dusk.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a soda kiln right now. Anyone have one they want to give away?

More from Botton’s Architecture of Happiness. The first chapter establishes the fact that good architecture won’t necessarily make us happier, which was unexpected but is true. Spousal tension, death and destruction happen in beautiful homes as much as in shacks, he points out. But the chapter ends with this:

Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time, it means acknowledging that buildings are able to solve no more than a fraction of our dissatisfactions or prevent evil from unfolding under their watch. Architecture, even at its most accomplished, will only ever constitute a small, and imperfect (expensive, prone to destruction and morally unreliable), protest against the state of things . . .

But if we accept the legitimacy of the subject nevertheless, then a new and contentious series of questions at once opens up. We have to confront the vexed point on which so much of the history of architecture pivots. We have to ask what exactly a beautiful building might look like.

The book is quite a fun read, well-written so far (with one or two paragraphical exceptions), and I’m very eager to see where it goes. If you couldn’t tell.

Photo from Wikipedia

Sir Ken Robinson ponders the damage that our current incarnation of public education does to a child’s creativity in this humorous twenty minute video.

I’ve transcribed a couple of sections here for your reading pleasure, if you can’t find the time to watch the spot it its entirety.

Creativity now is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status . . .

Kids aren’t frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original . . . and by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. We run our companies this way; we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make, and the result is that we’re educating people out of their creative capacities.

Robinson, a Brit who moved to L.A. five years ago, doesn’t fail to point out that basically everywhere you go with a public education system you see the same hierarchy, where mathematics and literacy are at the top and the arts are at the bottom.

We all have bodies, don’t we. Did I miss a meeting? Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side. If you were to visit education as an alien and say ‘What’s it for, public education?’ I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output . . . I think you’ve had to conclude the whole purpose of public education through the world is to produce university professors . . .

In my experience professors, not all of them, but typically they live in their heads . . . They’re disembodied . . . They look at their body as a form of transport for their heads. You know; don’t they. It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.

Sir Robinson goes on to point out that there were no public education systems before the 19th century, and that said education was created to meet the needs of industrialism. He further notes that academic ability has come to dominate our idea of intelligence. The end point being to get into the university. Intelligence is diverse, he rightly points out, as well as dynamic.

I’ll finish by exhorting you to watch the video; there’s a lot there that I haven’t transcribed. Pay close attention to the anecdote near the end of the video talking regarding Gillian Lynn, who choreographed Cats and Phantom of the Opera.

I found the video via Diving Into the Clay.

Adding: One last quote: “Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip mined the earth for a particular commodity, and for the future it won’t service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.”

Glazes that are more or less useless in functional ceramics can do wonderful things for sculptural clay pieces. With this in mind, I’m game for trying some pretty strange things. This isn’t uncommon in the clay world anyway, where my college professors encouraged us with stories of their own experimentation. The one I remember in particular was a pizza being used to glaze a work. Of course, they warned us not to try these things in the university’s kilns.

I fired some glazed works this weekend with a few odds and ends as tests. One of these tests was simply a fishing sinker on a bisqued tile. Such sinkers, as I recall from my fishing days, are made of lead.

The one I used wasn’t as new as the picture above. It had been used and was slightly corroded.

The red in the lower left is iron oxide, as a label on the tile. Some of it leached into the lead on that edge, but I don’t think it changed the color or consistency of the glaze — though I could be wrong. It ran like crazy, which makes sense for a flux material. What was more surprising is how much of it there is on the tile, and subsequently the kiln shelf. The length of the sinker was about 5/8 of an inch long. The tile is roughly 3 1/2 inches square.

I don’t know if or how this would ever make it into my work, but it’s good to know anyway.

I have been meaning to make a substantive post on TAE for sometime; my apologies to all of the readers here that have been patiently waiting to learn more about the field of planning and what specifically I do. I think it is very interesting the questions that I receive as a planner. I think my field is one of mystery to many people in some ways, which is an irony in itself, because it so closely universally affects everyone.

So what is planning? Maybe the best way to break this down is by saying first off what planning is not. Planning is not a rote organizational tool to make your days more productive or an apparatus by which to lift outdated bureaucracies to more efficient epiphanies. Above all, the planning profession does not include wedding planners or event planners. I actually had someone think I did that once. Planning is more than an organizational tool in which someone thinks about planning out their day or their future. Planning is really the art of managing the processes of change and public facilitation and collaboration. It is also extremely diverse in the fields it is influenced by. Planning is political, legal, economic, social, technical, artistic, theoretical, and environmental.

So how is the vast planning profession manifested in the day to day work of a planner? Well, in planning there are many types of practitioners, similar to medicine, engineering, or law. There are transportation planners, environmental planners, policy planners, advocacy planners, land use planners, urban planners, current planners and long-range planners, to name a few. All of these subsets can be divided into the public sector or the private sector.

I will focus on the municipal side of planning as that is what I do. Typically, planning in a public sector setting includes the current planning and long-range planning subset. The following is a gross simplification of the daily life of a current planner. The current planner, or also known as the “planner of the day,” is a planner who handles all land use related requests from the public. Anytime someone wants to do something that affects urban form, i.e. subdividing land (literally where we get the term “subdivision”), constructing a new shopping center, or rezoning property, the current planner responds.

The current planner’s role is administrative. It involves checking permit applications to ensure that they conform to the Municipal Code provisions, zoning regulations, and the community’s master plan or comprehensive plan. Once everything is checked, the planner offers a recommendation relating to the item in question. This is forwarded in a staff report to the Planning Commission of the city. The Commission reads the report and then casts a vote which, in the case of my community Siloam Springs, is also a recommendation. The Planning Commission’s recommendation is forwarded to the Board of Directors (commonly referred to as the City Council) who makes the final decision on the item through an ordinance or a resolution, depending on the type of item. Every month there are applications made to the Planning Department, which the current planner must review and offer recommendations on. This is the unending development cycle that is part of the planner’s job to regulate and review.

Long-range planning in the municipal setting involves a more in depth look at how things should be. This is the area in which I am more adept to. I like to think about this kind of planning as more like problem solving. People have problems with life in their communities and planners seek out ways to fix these problems. Long-range planners think a lot about the future. They attempt to look at current trends and project needs for the future. These needs and current problems are embedded inside the community’s vision for the future. This vision, future needs, etc. are all housed within plans. Hence, the name planner is associated with the profession; they literally draft and author plans. The plans are essential public policy documents that work to guide future decision making by the elected officials and city staff. This is once again the Planning Commission and the City Council, which, as seen earlier in this blog, are reviewing development. So this brings us full circle. This is why I always say, planning is politics. Planning cannot escape the reach of politics and economics.

The important thing that I like to emphasize when I am talking about my job is that planners do not have as much power as people think they have. We are not a secret order making these plans to control everyone’s lives in the secluded dark corners of dusty offices in City Hall. Planning is far from that. Planning is a public process that involves anyone reading these words who may live in a city or town. That means you! You are the ones who do the planning! How is that? Let me explain.

Planners go to great lengths to harvest public participation. When planners are thinking about the community, they have an ethical obligation to take in the community’s needs and vision into account. This is the life blood of a good comprehensive plan. The vision is basically what the community will be. Will it be big or small? Will it have urban or rural character? It all comes down to the vision. In my community, when we were starting the process of creating a new comprehensive plan, I and some of my colleagues conducted vision sessions. These vision gathering sessions allowed anyone from the general public to take markers and literally draw out their plans for the community. Staff then worked to facilitate the process and ensured that everyone knew what to do and was actively engaged in the process. In the case of Siloam Springs, all of the maps we received were combined together into a master composite map. This composite map was the basis, or foundation, for the 2030 land use map.

I feel I have gone into more detail than I thought I would at the onset of writing this post today! I hope this clears up some of the mystery about what planning involves. Really, it is an interface or membrane between the publics’ needs and the governing entity that regulates the built and natural environment. I hope you have enjoyed this little window I have opened into the world of a planner. I will be posting more on how this relates to urban design and beyond!

I’ve cited Alain de Botton’s book The Architecture of Happiness a few times on The Aesthetic Elevator now after hearing him talk on NPR a couple years ago, particularly with respect to personal aesthetics. Last month I purchased the book as part of our anniversary celebration, and began reading it this week. Botton isn’t an architect — he’s a writer — but his observations on aesthetics and how the built environment plays into our everyday lives appear sound from the little I know so far.

Last night I read a paragraph from the book that said this:

When we have attained our [architectural] goals, our buildings have a grievous tendency to fall apart again with precipitate speed. It can be hard to walk into a freshly decorated house without feeling pre-emptively sad at the decay impatiently waiting to begin: how soon the walls will crack, the white cupboards will yellow and the carpets stain. The ruins of the Ancient World offer a mocking lesson for anyone waiting for builders to finish their work. How proud the householders of Pompeii must have been.

The idea of entropy, things falling apart, makes tangential appearances in my artwork and philosophy from time to time. This is especially true when I’m thinking about and employing found objects. It’s an interesting point Botton makes in the quote, but I’d like to counter it with something he didn’t mention (maybe it’s brought up later in the book, but I wouldn’t know about that yet).

Yes, all things tend towards disorder, disintegration. I have a sense, even, that American environments (Botton is a Swiss born Brit) tend to appear more disintegrated than some others. We’re a youthful country of efficiency, efficiency on the front end. We want it and we want it now, and who cares what happens over time with whatever it is. In other words, it’s more important to have the house now than to wait five years and save enough money so that it can be built well. It’s more important to stand in line for half a day to purchase an iPhone than wait for a later model where the bugs will be worked out. You get catch my drift.

Our built environment often reflects our myopic culture. We build cheaply with cheap materials in a lot of cases, figuring we’ll just demolish and rebuild on the same plot when we need to. It’s good for the economy, right? The builders have work, the demolition crews get paid and the garbage men have truckloads of debris to carry to the landfills.

What if we were to take a little more time and spend a little more money building our cities, using more enduring materials. Yes, entropy will still take hold, but there are ways we can guide it to our aesthetic advantage. Stone, concrete and clay (brick) will last a long time if properly put together and cared for. Sure, they might take more energy to produce in the short-term, but they’ll also be around a lot longer than most stick framed houses which makes them a sustainable choice as well as an aesthetic one.

The above photograph demonstrates the kind of patina age can give to certain materials, a beautiful patina that modern homeowners try and replicate. The color of durable woods — by durable I mean harder woods that stand up to rot and termites better than pine or fir — is also very agreeable with age. I plan to create a dining room table out of old hard oak salvaged from a remodel job I worked on three years ago. Some of the rough cut boards are quarter sawn and others plain sawn, they vary in color and are full of little nail holes, but the finished product will be gorgeous if I can pull it off.

My point is that age, decay, in certain materials doesn’t have to be an exclusively sad event, and in fact can be cause for rejoicing. The concrete block patio in my backyard is for more interesting now that it has a few more years under its belt. The stains and moss give the surface a visual depth that new concrete just doesn’t have. Further, it’s just as strong as when it was new. If I recall my strength of materials course correctly, concrete actually hardens as it ages.

Photo from Wikipedia