Local Traditions

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Growing New Roots for Our Colorado Home

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Growing New Roots for Our Colorado Home

Does absence make the heart grow fonder? It has been over a year since writing about my new duty with Colorado Main Street and a lot happened in 2018, just not so much blog writing! I am sorry for such a lengthy break. The move to Colorado was a challenging transition for my family, and spending time acclimating and adventuring together has taken priority.

Moving is like uprooting a plant and putting it somewhere new. Our life-connections (the people and places in our daily lives) are radically altered, and we have to adjust and figure out our place again.

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Quality Infill Development: Begins in the Past

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Quality Infill Development: Begins in the Past

Last week kicked off a broad sweep through some ideas for conservation-based development. Quality infill development can certainly conserve resources. It can also break the cycle of disinvestment and build back the vibrancy and strength that was lost when the heartstrings of our towns were stretched out in all directions.

The heart of a Green Heart Town is its historic district, and quality infill construction is a primary tool for keeping them healthy and strong. The Main Street district and surrounding historic neighborhoods were once the seat of all town life, the best place to buy and trade for good and services and interact with others from the area. After a time of disinvestment in historic downtowns from the 1960s-90s, these places are again becoming full of vibrant new potential.

Conservation-Based Development is a Return to the Land

Conservation-Based Development is a Return to the Land

Appreciating conservation-based development is to understand that we exist within something larger. Like a log being split, most development has torn us from our relationship with the land. Our natural environment not only provides the context for life, it is our largest and most important resource. 

For long-time, we lived close to the land and developed a regionally-specific architecture that was built in sympathy to the surroundings. We created commercial centers called towns and cities, and others chose to live on large plots to farm. As Americans became 2 car households, got central air-conditioning, the color TV, and personal computers we have become uncoupled, or split, away from real living on this planet.

"Friendly" Robots and the New Vernacular

"Friendly" Robots and the New Vernacular

My air-conditioner is killing me! Modern technologies like the car, color TV, air conditioning and the Internet have been creeping up over us slowly since the 1950's. They have been slowly killing the Earth, homogenizing our beautiful, regionally-specific design styles, and breaking up our communities. It's Creeping Death! (music reference).

New technologies (e.g. the IPad) have taken away the American traditions of walking to the corner store, watching the kids play in the street, and visiting with neighbors from porch to porch. These slices of American life used to bring us together, but modern technology seems to be pulling us all apart. All our computers and robots are making us soft.

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Maryland reACT House Celebrates the 7 Generation Principle

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Maryland reACT House Celebrates the 7 Generation Principle

In my tour of the 2017 Solar Decathlon, Team Maryland was my favorite. Their project called reACT (ie. Resilient Adaptive Climate Technology) proved to me that a sustainable future needs to merge indigenous/cultural traditions along with modern technology. This is not just about energy either. Even though the architecture and engineering were exceptional in this design, the incorporation of cultural traditions gave the house much more impact than the rest of the entries at the Solar Decathlon. 

During my tour of reACT, I spoke with some of the team and learned about the Native American philosophy called the "7th Generation Principle". This simply means that we should think about our future descendants 7 generations from now (or about 140 years) and honor them by leaving the world better.

 

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Simple HP Review, Survival & Certificate of Appropriateness

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Simple HP Review, Survival & Certificate of Appropriateness

Completing the historic preservation review process and earning your first certificate of appropriateness may sound a little tedious but it doesn't have to be. Taking the right approach, the process can be straightforward and instructive while providing a neat lesson on your community’s traditional building methods. Earning a certificate of appropriateness (COA) for the Mesta Park project involved a learning curve but we were rewarded with a distilled understanding of the process - one that should ring true in any community.

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Your Common Thread Stitches a Vibrant Community

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Your Common Thread Stitches a Vibrant Community

Do you want to live in a Green Heart Town, where there is a sense of health, community, and legacy? This kind of town can only be a product of community-wide sustainable development, which takes thoughtful planning and action. At the center of the effort, I see each one of our lives as a common thread skillfully used to create better places for everyone to live, work and play. 

The transformation begins by loving our family and community well, caring for our neighbors, and becoming more future-minded. The wonderful paradox is that being future-minded also makes our lives better today, too! 

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Holistic Building Design: Inherent Green and High Tech

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Holistic Building Design: Inherent Green and High Tech

Preservation Future Tense” was the theme for Oklahoma’s 29th Annual Statewide Preservation Conference held in Oklahoma City. In partnership with our State Historic Preservation Office, the Oklahoma Main Street Program invited James Lindberg, Senior Director of the Preservation Green Lab (PGL) to speak at the closing Plenary Session. Since 2009 PGL, a part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has authored some of the most current and forward-looking sustainable preservation research ever done. 

Through reports such as The Greenest Building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse, PGL is outlining how historic preservation

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Vernacular Architecture & Place-Based Design - Part 2

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Vernacular Architecture & Place-Based Design - Part 2

Vernacular architecture (aka. traditional architecture) is a topic we are going to be referring back to often. “Looking back before moving ahead” is a principle that any sustainable designer should cherish. Not only are our communities’ histories informative, they are also treasures that can enrich our lives. We can choose to become part of the great story of our community, and leave it stronger.

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Vernacular Architecture & Place-Based Design - Part 1

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Vernacular Architecture & Place-Based Design - Part 1

There is a timeless way of building and we have forgotten it!  

The historic vernacular architecture is the rudimentary construction done by your town’s original builders, with the traditions, skills and resources they had at hand. You might also think of it as your town’s architecture, before architects.

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