Across the ponds

Proxy Agency

I went with Kirk on a short jaunt across the ponds over the weekend to Toronto; he was there to give a talk at York University while the main attraction for me was the chance to visit with Bob and Claudine, friends from the Berkeley era I haven't seen for 10 or more years. True to the soul of an urbanite, they reside close to downtown Toronto, in an area called Cabbagetown, with a cat named Hector whom they rescued (with the owner's consent), from been woefully cooped up at a neighbor's attic. 

Out to pasture

I managed to pack in quite a few sight-seeing activities for our short stay.  Here are some of the highlights.  Taking advantage on our central location, soon after we arrived, Bob and Claudine took us on a quick walk around the Financial District.  At the heart of it is the Toronto-Dominion Center which comprises a group of six towers, connected on the ground by an open plaza and green space, by Mies van der Rohe, with their facades marked by Mies's inimitable, evenly spaced, soaring, slender, steel mullions painted in black.  These stark-looking buildings are somewhat mollified by a group of resting cow sculptures calmly taking in the hustle and bustle of the life around it.  

Allen Lambert Galleria

a conditioned urban alley

We next came upon the Allen Lambert Galleria, by Santiago Calatrava, a light-filled insertion into the interstitial spaces in the tightly built urban fabric.  It joins a diverse group of existing buildings under a canopy created by a series of parabolic steel arches and glass.  It reminds me of the Galleria in Milan and is among the various iterations of the glazed arcade typology made possible by the invention of cast                                             iron and plate glass.

As is my wont whenever I'm on a short visit to a new city, I booked in advance a guided architectural walk, this time, the Art and Performance Tour in the Entertainment District of Toronto.  And as is my usual good fortune, I managed to meet up with a knowledgeable and enthusiastic volunteer architecture buff, and as we happened to be the only two visitors for the tour on that Saturday morning, we got all his attention.  Of the many buildings we stopped by, two stood out - The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and the nearby Sharp Center for Design.  You can see the two buildings in a short video by an architecture critic, Christopher Hume, at the Toronto Star.

A disappearing act

Exuberant curve

Bent wood armature

Bent wood spiral staircase

The most recent expansion of AGO is a rare, self-effacing work by Frank Gehry, a native son, where his own claim to respect a building's context (for once) rings true.  The Concept was exemplified by the building's very dissimilar facades--a curving, billowing glass screen over a bent-wood armature along Dundas Street and a flat, glass and titanium screen painted in blue, with a surreal exterior spiral staircase rising in midair, facing the Grange Park, behind the historic Grange House.  The idea, we were told, was to paint the facade in blue, which at certain moments can seem to merge with the sky, so as not to overpower its smaller neighbor, the stately historic mansion, and the adjacent park grounds.

Gratitude for a leg up

Tabletop

To the right of the park, rises the lively white "tabletop", clad in corrugated aluminum with random "pixellated" black squares and rectangles, sitting on roughly 85-ft tall, colorful, hollow steel legs, hovering above existing buildings on the OCAD campus.  It houses two levels of studio and teaching spaces; its elevated position enabled the architect (Will Alsop) to create the new facility without having to demolish the existing buildings on the site.  

The Crystal

hard to be missed

We continued on our architectural exploration of Toronto further north along University Avenue, passing Queen's Park, to the edge of Bloor Street. There are several notable buildings along this stretch of commercial and university property, but the one which screams out the loudest for attention is the so-called Crystal Addition to the Royal Ontario Museum by Daniel Libeskind.  Its aggressive and over-the-top presence on the streetscape has gotten some bad rap, with a few exceptions, from some critics and the public but, from what I could see, it seems to have achieved the purpose of engaging and animating the street life and drawing the public into its otherwise heavy, neo-Romanesque building from the early 20th Century.  

Canada seems to have sidestepped the banking crisis (due to the conservative lending practice of their venerable banking institutions, according to our guide), and bucked the global trend of economic recession.  According to an article in the Toronto Star, Toronto has been experiencing unprecedented growth in construction, especially in mixed-use, commercial/residential towers, and there were more towers (132) under construction last year in Toronto than any other city on earth, with even more this year.  My overall impression of the architectural scene in Toronto, at least in the downtown area, is that they have a hodgepodge of old and new buildings but do not have a coherent story to tell or a prominent skyline to speak of.  With due respect, Toronto, though in close geographic and cultural proximity to New York State, is no New York City.  No wonder Claudine bemoaned the loss of her beloved NYC when she first moved there.  

We had a couple of curious cultural experiences passing through Toronto Pearson International Airport.  On the way in, we were sent to the Immigration area because of the suspicion that Kirk might be engaging in some covert business consultation as he was to be compensated for giving a "colloquium" ("what is that?", the Immigration Officer asked) at York University.  On the way out, I had an unpleasant exchange with a Canadian Airline agent when I asked her how to get to the Customs area.  (For flights to the U.S. one has to clear US Customs in Toronto.)  She answered me with such thinly veiled contempt that it took my breath away.  I'm not sure whether her sense of superiority was directed to me as a US Citizen or as a person of Asian descent.    

Surveying our kingdom

A bouquet of sage

Kirk and I have recently started a practice (his idea) of surveying our "kingdom," or, more accurately, our temporary possession of a speck of the earth, in the few half-hours of fading sun before the dusk sets in.  It was motivated partly by a sense of guilt for having neglected our garden for so long and partly by a sense of urgency born out of the realization that the pleasant late summer evenings are not going to last much longer. (Perhaps we should also take a survey of, metaphorically speaking, the state of our lives...)  We therefore, after dinner, don our colorful gardening boots (sloggers--they're called) and our gloves, brandish our gardening shears, and work and walk our way through the various plots in our yard, picking up fallen branches, cutting down dry rot, pulling up weeds or what look like weeds, and generally attempting to retrieve a sense of control over and order in our tiny kingdom and combat, however futilely, nature's tendency to grow wild and unmanageable.  

My attempt in the past two years to add color and interest to our yard by planting perennials and herbs has not produced much to speak of, I'm sorry to report; what tender shoots have survived the frost and drought have been so completely smothered by weeds and dead leaves that they are hardly recognizable or distinguishable from weeds. I've since learned that there is much more nurturing and caring work to do than just putting down the little plants in the ground, about a half-day's work at most; I had assumed that Mother Nature would take care of these little plants and that they would just mature on their own and before long look like their glossy counterparts in the nursery catalogs.  Alas, to successfully tend and cultivate one's garden requires much more commitment and hard work than I have expended; Kirk laughingly called my gardening experiment my failed attempt to live like a "gentlewoman farmer." 

Bloomington is currently under mandatory water restriction due to this summer's drought which has hit hard several Midwestern States.  Our hope to have a new wisteria vine planted may have to be delayed. The little wisteria offshoot which we transplanted from our neighbor's vine is not doing very well either and not likely to survive, I'm afraid.  Here's hoping our transplantation to the soil of Indiana will fare better. 

  

Calvin, the Cool Cat

Cool Cat Calvin

Calvin has taken to staying for a couple hours in the Sunroom after we finish breakfast.  He shows up right on time, almost every morning, while we are laying out the table for breakfast.  As soon as we let him in, he jumps onto his favorite chair (imagine Wang-Tzu in his favorite spot at the table), and curls up beside me, pushing me (affectionately I'm sure) so that I end up perched on 1/3rd of the seat cushion, for a treat of love and a massage.  Picture me holding a cup or newspaper with my right hand while rubbing Calvin's skull with my left hand.  He stays on the chair after I vacate it, composes himself for a morning nap and keeps Kirk company while he finishes reading the paper.  Kirk, in the past, would trick him out of the room when he finishes breakfast but Calvin has learned not to take the bait so easily and has shown no inclination in the least to stir out of the chair when Kirk holds the door open enticingly.  Kirk has finally conceded the game to the clever Calvin and taken to propping open the screen door with a broom and leaving him alone there.  I wonder what will happen to our morning routine with Calvin when the weather gets cold and we no longer eat breakfast out in the Sunroom.  Stay tuned...

Wisteria No More - Once More

Wisteria No More

The wisteria vine that was planted 46 years ago [in 1966] when our house and garden were constructed, finally succumbed to the two consecutive droughts we had this and last year.  It was barely hanging on to life in the spring but shriveled up beyond rescue this summer.  We are hoping to have a new one, pretty far along in size, planted in the same spot soon--when our yard maintenance company, Soaring Eagle, is able to get ahold of one.
    

Birth astride a grave

08.06.2012 Update:
Out of the blue, our neighbor, the Bells, whom we rarely see, but who knew that our wisteria died, offered to give us a little offshoot of their flourishing wisteria vine, whose tendrils have already climbed up the metal frame placed beside it.  It was such a welcome gift, for I've not heard back from our landscape guy about finding us a replacement.  I've since learned that his lackadaisical attitude toward running his business is well-known among our neighbors.  He has at least sent a couple of guys over to take down the dead vine so I've not quite despaired about his getting us a bigger specimen in the near future.


 09.06.2012 Update:

Amethyst Falls

Our long-awaited new wisteria vine finally arrived yesterday and was securely embedded in the plot behind that of the original wisteria to give it more elbow room to grow.  It is of the Wisteria frutescens species, also known as Amethyst Falls -- a native, non-invasive species of wisteria, purported to be fast-blooming, in the first year after planting.  We hope that it will thrive in its new home for years to come.

Revived despite odds

With the help of the recent rain, the little wisteria offshoot we transplanted from our neighbor's yard has revived despite being given up as dead less than a week ago; I returned the metal screen to our neighbor thinking that it was beyond hope, O Ye of little faith.  

Domus Revisited

View from above

I got the idea of my new house design while listening to a podcast, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: Houses and Villas at Pompeii, also available as a video, which is part of a course on Roman Architecture by Diana Kleiner from Yale University on iTune U.  In it she describes in detail the ruins of houses and villas in Pompeii which survived the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.  I was attracted to the simplicity of the ideal Roman House Plan (Domus Italica) which she attributed to the writing of a Roman architect, Vitruvius, who flourished in the 1st century BC.  I thought that the typical Domus house plan, which is essentially a house with an open courtyard (atrium), could easily be transplanted to an urban or suburban environment in today's world in a suitable climate.  Courtyard style houses were by no means invented by the Romans but can be found in many ancient cultures, including Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese civilizations. 

I have always been partial to this particular dwelling type, as you can tell from the several houses I designed and published on my blog, ever since my mother took me to visit my aunt's house in the countryside of southern Taiwan when I was little.  The house left a strong impression on me to this day.  It was a three-sided courtyard house consisting of a series of rooms wrapped around a large courtyard with openings connecting them to one another on the courtyard side of the rooms.  It housed three generations of two families, one on each wing, with the connecting side shared between them; the children and women of the two families, who were related, shared play and work in the open courtyard.  It seemed to me to be a very efficient arrangement of dwelling space, specially suited for the agricultural society where it existed. 

My design closely follows the arrangement of room-functions in the simple Domus Italica plan with a tripartite division of space facing the street -- two large public spaces, which were shop fronts in ancient Roman time, now a garage and an office or studio, flanking a narrow entryway in the middle.  After passing through the vestibule, one enters the main courtyard of the house, open to the sky, with a fountain in the middle, surrounded by a colonnaded porch.  A series of bedrooms and baths line the east side of the courtyard, with the utility room, a half bath, and the kitchen on the west.  The living/dinning room and the master bedroom are located on the south end of the courtyard which look into the garden in the back through another colonnaded porch.  The design as it is, a compact 2,340 S.F. house for two persons, can be implemented on a narrow urban lot -- a private oasis hidden behind tall walls.  It can easily be enlarged, if one so desires, by stretching it in the north-south or east-west direction, or both.  

Here are some renderings of the computer model I made of the design:   

North Elevation

South Elevation

East Elevation

West Elevation

Transverse Section looking North

Transverse Section looking South

Longitudinal Section looking East

Longitudinal Section looking West

Courtyard looking South

Courtyard looking East

Living-Dining Room

Kitchen

As usual, I made a walk-through animation of the exterior and interior of the house.  I still haven't perfected the techniques of making smooth animations, but you can at least get a sense of what it's like walking around the house inside and out.

Exterior Walk-through

Interior Walk-through

The Clever Calvin

We have quasi-adopted a cat named Calvin who lives two-door down from us on our street. The reason we know these facts about him is because he wears a collar with a tag and tiny bell on his neck.  He is very affectionate, a sucker for belly rubs, and very persistent in seeking attention.  He walks around the neighborhood, visits all the houses, and is, for all we know, greeted affectionately by all.  He often pays us a morning call while we're having breakfast in the Sunroom and then comes back for an evening visit at supper time, with a little tinkling of the bell announcing his arrival.  It isn't because he wants to be fed that he comes around at those hours but because he can usually find us then.  I've come to miss hearing his tinkering bell if he doesn't show up during meal time. 

Calvin started visiting us several months ago; whenever we were out in the yard he would appear, seemingly from nowhere.  As he seemed friendly, we would pat him and play with him a bit.  I was often startled by his tail brushing against my legs when I was doing something in the yard; I even had the uncomfortable feeling of being stalked.  Once we got to know him better, whenever he saw us outside he would follow us closely whichever direction we moved with the intention, which soon became clear, of nudging his way inside our house.  One of his signature maneuvers toward that goal was to dart, of a sudden, in front of us and plump himself down at our feet at every opportunity, intercepting our walk, and eventually, landing his body right at our doorstep, preventing us from opening the door, or more precisely, getting into the house without him.  We were resolute about not letting him into the house at first; so to get rid of him, Kirk and I had to work as a tag team, with one of us occupying his attention while the other sneaking into the house from another door.  Another tactic he used was to sit in front of the Sunroom door and meow pitifully.  

I don't remember when we tacitly decided to let him in, to the Sunroom only, mind you, not inside the house.  Before long, he was on our laps or sitting next to us on the chair and being patted and rubbed to his heart's content.  

One morning last week, I noticed traces of blood on his face when I picked him up, and upon closer examination, I found that his nose was badly cut up.  It was so pitiful that while he looked at me with his doleful eyes, I couldn't bear to look him in the face.  I got the phone number of his owner from his tag and called.  His owner happened to be out of town but luckily his stepson, who was house-sitting, was able to pick him up and take him to the vet.  His stepson told Kirk that Calvin was fine when he let him out that morning.  We don't know what kind of scrape he got himself into to get the tip of his nose cut in half!  We were very relieved to see Calvin again a few days later; he was back to his usual playful self but I'm afraid his face is permanently disfigured.  I wonder if I would be able to let my cat out, if I had one, risking all kinds of danger.  But if you don't, what miserable life it is for them to be always cooped up in the house.  Unlike the domestic canine, strict domesticity and security don't seem to sit well with these independent-minded, freedom-loving creatures, or so I imagine.  As philosophers say in this case, it's not possible for us to know what it is like to be a bat (or, cat). 

Clever Calvin

No-nose Calvin, poor baby

Honest to John's Philosophy of Mind

I discovered some time ago an immense treasure trove of knowledge available on-line for free--the iTune [Virtual] University. Like Google's Gutenberg Project which makes available without charge a huge collection of copyright-expired books in digital format, iTune U provides podcasts or recordings of actual classroom instructions from various colleges and universities of various subjects which anybody (with Internet service) can subscribe to and listen to remotely (both in space and time) like a fly on the wall. What a democratizing service this can provide, in terms of disseminating knowledge and raising the general standard of education, if only more people take advantage of it! In addition, it also serves to preserve an oral record, as it happens, of our intellectual history for future generations.

While browsing what's being offered at iTune U, I stumbled on some philosophy courses given by John Searle, I almost want to say, Sir John Searle, at UC Berkeley-- the same guy, in case you don't know, who taught there when Kirk was a graduate student almost thirty years ago. (Incidentally, don't believe everything written on the Wikipedia about Searle, especially on his philosophical views, as, according to him, a lot of it is incorrect.)  He is a famous professor of philosophy for many reasons, not the least of which is his teaching persona--brassy, John Wayne style in his self-assuredness, and very entertaining, almost vaudeville-like, I imagine, as he has been doing these routines for upward 50+ years.

I started listening to his spring 2010 lectures on Philosophy of Mind (132) on and off for some time now and I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed listening to them.  For my non-philosopher readers, if you ever wonder what they teach in undergraduate philosophy courses, you can't find a better specimen than Searle's.  Here is a recording of one of the same lectures he gave in 2011 in its entirety -

But I have to admit that I do not listen to these lectures with a hundred percent attention. Instead, I listen to them when I want to keep my mind from dwelling on what I may be doing at the time--mindless activities such as cleaning the house, or running on the treadmill or on the road. The grumpy mood that never fails to surge up in me when doing chores seems to vanish completely while my mind is trying its utmost to follow and understand what is being said. Time seems to elapse imperceptibly and more pleasantly in the interval. Last Sunday I managed to listen to three of his one-hour long lectures while doing my bi-weekly house cleaning.

I do not mean, of course, that I was able to keep up with all that was said in the class, but I do get the gist of each lecture and have some idea about the main issues in the Philosophy of Mind, the key figures in the said philosophical tradition, and, most importantly, how they are all wrong-headed, at least, according to John.

What follows are two videos on YouTube of Searle being interviewed, one considerably younger than the other; there are quite a few videos available on YouTube should you want to learn more about him -