Writing

Naoussa

Blue dome and the cross of gold
the sigh of the tamarisks

Bamboo’s tall fans
the smell of citrón
whiteness of the air
the kiss of the sea
mules bray
as we make love

the voice
of the meltémi

Listen Here:

THE LAST TIME I SAW HOUSTON

Blood-orange cloud towers
Writhing in the sunset
The tall pines in shadow
And the tentacular roadways
Thick with engines
Breathing like fire-eaters

A sense of not going forward
A sense of going too far
Like Los Angeles
New York
Or Mexico City

Another empire of the living
Built on an empire of the dead,
This one made of concrete,
Steel, and swamp gas,
Water rising up
From the hurricane
Into a forest of billboards
Unintentionally marketing the
Scientific wisdom of the Savior:

The meek shall inherit the Earth

Listen Here:

“It was over a hundred degrees. And it was night. The chulos shuffled their feet, tipped the bottles. It was hard for them to see it like the Aztec because they weren’t there before the land was covered with concrete and steel. The Aztec had been there when people slept under their horses in the rain.”

“As they pulled out onto the freeway he saw the mountains to the South riven by canyons and deep gullies fallen into shadow and filled with snow and icemelt from the higher elevations. The grade flattened out and ran straight to the base of the range, its enormous shoulders cloaked in brilliant moonlight, flooding down the glowing, auroral flanks. Bands and streamers of what looked like snow rose in shimmering vortices high up near the peaks. They smoked from the pipe and drank whiskey in silence and drove on. The freeway slid away and they entered a two-lane road that curled around the base of the mountains which jumped up precipitously out of the flat waste as if they had risen from underground in a violent gesture of disapproval. They passed an old billboard standing out in the desert with only a telephone number on it. Rocks and boulders were strewn everywhere as if they’d been thrown down by some Polyphemus.”

“Buildings, their occupants, and the environments they operate in are complex systems. The sphere of analysis required to evaluate their integrated financial, energetic^[1], and environmental performance has not yet been fully determined and the pace of change in building technology, the regulatory arena and energy modeling is rapid.  The choice of system boundaries determines the outcome^[2] and we are still learning how to define those boundaries.”

ABSTRACT
The Building Envelope manages heat flows between the external environment and the interior space, admits daylight, mitigates sound transmission, and diverts and controls flows of air and water. As such, the Building Envelope is the mediator of all energy transfers for the building and it controls the energy equation. We have been trained to regard the envelope as a barrier, something which rejects unwanted flows, and mechanical and electrical equipment as systems which remove or mitigate them. But in High-Performance Buildings, we need to re-orient our focus, and regard the envelope as more like a membrane or a collector, something which can also absorb and translate energy into a more useful form. A well-designed and constructed envelope does not become obsolete like MEP technologies, and its performance does not fluctuate with the cost of energy, so its value must be integral with the entire life-cycle cost of the building.

* THE POWER OF SMALL NUMBERS:
Why Citizen Action & Resource Efficiency are Just as Important as Policy & Technology
Since 2003, numerous organizations such as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Department of Energy, the Energy Information Administration, the United States Geological Survey and The Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan, have conducted research demonstrating that in the US we are wasting anywhere from 30-65% of our Energy, Food, Water & Materials every year. Although policy initiatives and clean technologies are essential, a large part can and must be played by every citizen on a daily basis to make Resource Efficiency & Waste Reduction some of our highest priorities.  We know that small changes in simple behaviors can leverage mass effects with coordinated action: just re-using paper cups would achieve energy savings in the billions of KWH. Since Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) in the US are approx. 70% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), an enormous opportunity is there for citizens to change consumption patterns and conserve resources.

“In a great picture book, text and image are married in a pas-de-deux which delights the eye and the ear of adult and child at the same time. Since children hear language spoken first by their parents, it is essential for them to be stimulated during reading time by words that are filled with color, tone, texture and timbre. When this is done properly, image and text complement one another in a way that does not subordinate one to the other, but produces a chord in the mind, like the opening and closing of a music box.”