Thick, galvanised-steel frames highlight a selection of windows on the concrete facade of this apartment block in Tokyo designed by Japanese studios Sasaki Architecture and Atelier O (+ slideshow). (more…)
From the architect. The Ceramic house project is a retrospective attempt which tracing back to architectural fundamental authenticity. We wish to integrate the new house with the site by the truthful simplest design methodology, which makes the house in connection with the site as an authentic way of being, rather than making judgments only through aesthetic visual aspects.
In the existing site, there are some old buildings and one big tree which as irreplaceable site features. Rather than remove and replace them with a brand-new object, or build a fake reality nostalgic context. We take the old as the inseparable elements along with the new building. Their existence represents the reemergence of site memory.
The new building slightly attach on the old façade through the reasonable structure layout and circumspect construction detail design. Mottled worn walls and simply plain materials such as brick and wood, they naturally coexist and integrate with each other ideally. The old wall represents the signing of timing, which becomes the unduplicated characteristic feature of the site.
The big tree becomes the shading for the south balcony which prevent directly sight explosion from the road, and provide the diversity light and shadow on the facade in different seasons. As a place for ceramic artists’ exhibition, communication and working, slightly rough texture material such as concrete and brick make a delightful contrast with refined ceramic art works. The humble authentic architecture itself becomes the background of the art works.
For his first solo exhibition in the USA, Berlin-based architect Diébédo Francis Kéré has created a rainbow-coloured installation made of hundreds of strands of lightweight cord (+ slideshow). (more…)
From the architect. Conceptually, the A&M Houses have been an experiment in drawing a relationship and balance between a reduced footprint, comfortable living and maximised amenity.
The undulation of the roof line and the north facing skylights open up the narrow volumes to the sky above promoting the feeling of abundance of space. The detailing of large openings and the continuation of the limestone flooring into the courtyard spaces aims to create generous and seamless connections to the outdoors, visually expanding the constricted floor-plate. Zinc cladding and waxed stucco walls contribute to the material palette and respond to the client’s ‘no-maintenance’ brief and the site’s close proxiity to the beach as no painting is required – ever!.
Inhabitants of the A&M houses are encouraged to modify and adapt spaces to facilitate maximum amenity in both an environmental and social sense. The use of sliding wall panels in the form of timber screens, frosted glass and linen curtains eliminate the need for fixed swing doors and allows each space to open up or close off according to visual and acoustic privacy needs.
Central to the material selection was the requirement to eliminate future maintenance. Anodised aluminium windows and internally waxed walls have a higher initial cost to install, however will be a more cost effective outcome in the longer term. Sustainability is at the core of the project. A smaller footprint not only generally requires less energy in the manufacture of the components but also the running costs of the building. The house is not air-conditioned and the tiled floors are conditioned with hydronic heating. All windows are double glazed and have external electrically controlled blinds to allow the user to control comfort.
Half the size of a typical new house, the A&M houses aim to provide a modest floor plate without compromising liveability.
From the architect. A consolidated landscape surrounded by gardens with big trees within the metropolis of Madrid is the fortunate starting point of this house.
The piece, of metallic and horizontal nature, produces the effect of having just one storey. With its proportions and materiality it both contrasts and blends with the tall trees of its environment.
The scale of the house is moderated through the understanding of the day area as a base emerging from the same natural stone which paves part of the plot. The night zone is placed on it and focuses the view to the north and south while protecting itself from the eyes of the neighbours and generating shaded terraces in which to enjoy the exterior.
The substantially square plan is designed to unite the program in a compact way. The staircase and central inner atrium distribute the rooms, establishing a functional hierarchy in which all spaces open up to the garden.
You’re reading The ONE Thing You Need To Know To Face Your Fears, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
If you want to go fast, go alone,
If you want to go far, go together.
You’re strong.
You can do it.
In the face of hardship and frustration, such words of encouragement are useless.
When everything seems scary and impossible, we don’t feel strong and we don’t feel like we can do it. We feel like we’re not good enough.
That’s how I used to feel a month back. And that’s how I had felt for quite a while before it all changed.
No, I didn’t become stronger. I found out that I don’t need to be.
Here is what happened:
In a recent article on my blog I revealed to the world (and myself) for the first time my fear of driving. In short, that’s not the fear you’d expect – I wasn’t afraid of using a car, but rather of the possibility of failure. I was afraid that I was going to be a crappy driver and I was making up excuses to never practice.
This had been going on for about 8 years.
Finally, I decided to face my fear, and for me this means writing about it.
I wrote the article and even while publishing it I felt that I’ve taken a huge step towards embracing and overcoming this fear of failure.
But, as you might read at the end of the article, I wasn’t even close to ready to get behind the steering wheel.
Then something changed. And the funny thing is, it wasn’t me.
After I published that article I received an avalanche of emails, messages on social media and retweets from people who encouraged me to give it a try.
For example, my fellow writer, Alan Marsden, messaged me on Twitter saying that once I start driving I’d “never look back. (except when reversing).”
My family and friends talked to me about it and shared their experiences.
After hearing one of my excuses that “I don’t need a car or to drive anyway” my friend pointed out that I didn’t know that I needed it. She told me that I didn’t know what I was missing.
A friend who I met online thanks to an article I wrote and published online, Sree, shared his personal story about his own fear of driving, how it came true and how he still found the strength to keep going.
Even my own husband finally realized how serious my issue is and started taking me for a drive almost every day after work. I was driving.
Surrounded by all the examples, support, love, encouragement and energy of these people I drove our car.
I felt like I’m flying on the wings of a crowd that truly cared about me.
I grabbed the steering wheel and I did it.
And I was horrible. Or at least I felt so. But it didn’t matter because joy had taken over my brain. I was sweating, my mouth was dry, my heart was pouncing and my left leg was shaking like it’s bongo time. Those of you who have used a manual car will know why.
I was so proud of myself.
After my first attempt my husband even said that I was way better than he had expected because we didn’t crash the car.
And then it hit me-it wasn’t me who was driving. It was a crowd of people who had encouraged me, helped me and shared their stories and experiences with me.
They gave me the courage. They showed me that I was not alone. That I didn’t have to face my fears all by myself.
Each one of them was right there with me in that car. And it was okay to have them hold my hand while I was turning the key in the ignition.
I felt so strong. I felt so powerful. And yes, finally, I felt that I can do it.
But not because I was better or stronger or more resilient. Rather, because I knew so many people loved me and cared about me.
I knew that they, too, have walked this walk and they, too, have felt the same fear, doubt and insecurity. After I realized that, there was nothing that could stop me because that would mean I’m letting them down.
I drove the car by myself but I was standing upon the shoulders of a crowd of people who did it before me. I can never say I did it alone.
And you know what? That’s okay. I might have never gotten on the driver’s seat if it wasn’t for the helping hands and words of people around me.
I learned that I didn’t need to do it all by myself.
What about you? Have you forgotten the one thing that matters when facing your fears – that you don’t need to do it all by yourself?
In hope that you agree that we were never meant to be alone, I share with you the profound African proverb that has recently become my favorite:
If you want to go fast, go alone,
If you want to go far, go together.
Keep driving, keep going, and remember-there are four seats in a car, you don’t need to drive by yourself….
Antonia Zorluer is a designer, writer, content marketer, and the inventor of The FiveBand. She writes for businesses at work and for pleasure at her personal happiness blog mintyhideout.com where you can find inspirational stories and tips on using writing for a better life. She loves to connect and talk happiness and writing on Twitter and Google +.
You’ve read The ONE Thing You Need To Know To Face Your Fears, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
After Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff, two brothers, wrote separate memoirs about their troubled upbringing, Tobias quoted his mother as saying, “If I’d known both my boys were going to be writers, I might have lived a little differently.”
It isn’t easy having a memoirist in the family—someone who, casting a light on his past, can’t help casting some of that light on you. My own mother knows that. I have written a memoir that is an investigation into the death, by suicide, of my father when I was fourteen, but I realized early that I would not be able to make sense of his life without trying to make sense of my mother’s, too. She reminded me of that when I began my research and sat down to interview her about my father. “You know,” she said, “I have a story, too.”
I asked her about that story: about her difficult Depression-era childhood, her joyous teenage romance with my father, her sudden marriage to him at seventeen when she became pregnant, and the two decades that followed in which she gave birth to eight children and witnessed her husband become increasingly distant and sick, physically and mentally.
In My Father Before Me, I wanted to tell the truth, or as much of it as I could discover, but the story I would tell—even if it involved events that occurred to other people, sometimes long before I was born—would necessarily be mine: a memoir is the account of one mind, the writer’s, contemplating a life. The narrative details in the book would be there because I had decided they were relevant, and they would be articulated in words I chose, with all of those words’ attendant tones and implications. Whatever truths the story implied would be my own truths, my own hunches.
My mother must have known this, but she trusted me with her story. My brother and sisters trusted me, too: I interviewed them all about their memories of our father. As I wrote, referring to the facts of their lives, I realized that they might recount those facts differently—or not at all—were they to tell the tale themselves. I began to worry: would my sister feel uncomfortable about my describing an assault she suffered when a stranger broke into the home where she was babysitting? Would my tactful, proud mother feel pain at my mentioning the pregnancy that caused her, as a teenager, to rush to the altar? And how would the family feel about my narrating the final days of my father’s life and the morning of his death, fixing that horrible, perplexing time in language, translating a mysterious and private sadness at the heart of the family into a story for public consumption? Would writing about my family seem an invasion, a pirating of the lives of others in service to some abstract notion of the value of truth and the integrity of art? Could I write an honest book without it seeming a betrayal of the people I loved?
Unlike some writers, I did not feel comfortable waving the flag of art to excuse my hurting people. I gave my mother and siblings veto power concerning what I wrote about them.
I shared drafts with my family, promising to remove anything that struck them as inaccurate, unfair, or too private to mention. They surprised me: no one told me I had revealed too much. My mother requested only two superficial revisions: the deletion of a questionable detail about her father and the rewording of something I’d heard her utter in a quarrel decades ago.
Nonetheless, by the time I finished the book, I sensed that her assent to it was taking some effort. She was saddened especially that, contemplating my childhood, I seemed to recall more tension and discord than joy. When the manuscript was accepted by a publisher and she knew that thousands of strangers would be reading about her marriage, she—perhaps feeling as the Wolff brothers’ mother had—sighed, “I’m glad you wrote a book. I just wish it weren’t this one.”
But she never asked me not to write it. She never requested, even with polite indirectness, that I not publish it. Whatever unease she and my siblings might have felt about my project, they set that feeling aside and trusted me. They let me do what I had to do.
For sharing their tale, memoirists—those revealers of secrets, those untanglers of mysteries—are often called “courageous.” Sometimes the greater courage is that of the other people in the story, the ones who didn’t write it.
Chris Forman’s books of poetry include Black Leapt In and Ransack and Dance. His memoir My Father Before Me is a 2016 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.
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Sig Nordal 