There’s an interesting post on archizoo about the concept of ‘Cathedral Thinking’:

For Rogers, the concept was about the care and commitment of people who contributed to building the cathedral, a decades-long task, yet would never see its completion. Its implications on vision and strategy development seemed to be about their outcome, a recognition that the successful implementation of the strategy may not be measured until long after it authors have moved on.

I think  starts to hint at the basic reason I’m so ambivalent about the project I posted earlier where a cathedral was converted into a bookstore. There’s something serene and foreign in the concept of thousands of people devoting their lives to a project they know they will never see finished; the sacrilege of that conversion in my mind has less to do with replacing religion with commerce and more to do with respecting the aspirations of all those craftsmen.  Especially in the US, there are very few objects which have remained important for more than a couple generations. We’re not going to be able to embrace long-term sustainability as a culture without retaining some reverence for the past; they’re two perspectives on the same process.

Dezeen just published some photos of a cathedral remodel; the cathedral had been turned into a retail store.

I have mixed feelings about this project.  On the one hand, the design itself is both sensitive to the nature of the existing building and interesting in its own right.  The space is being used as a book store, and the ‘stacks’ have been placed in the center of the space two levels high to retain the open majestic feeling of the nave.  The apse had been converted into a reading area filled with seats surrounding a cross-shaped table.  In all, the design is well executed.

But there’s something about this project that makes me uneasy.  Something about taking a cathedral – likely the result of centuries of work by thousands of craftsmen built as a sanctuary from the world of the profane being converted into a retail store seems like an unflattering commentary on the world we live in.

I’m neither religious nor a fan of historical preservation, so it surprises me that this project makes me uneasy; I suspect this is reflecting a growing uneasiness I’ve been feeling about our culture’s recent experiment with consumerism.  I feel like the slow monetization of virtually every aspect of our lives leaves us with a world that is lacking in both poetry and humanity.  Perhaps I’m just growing old enough to feel nostalgic for a past that never existed.

On a lark, I decided to do a google search for ‘Cohousing’ after commenting on it earlier, and the third result was for the Austin Cohousing web page.  It turns out that there’s a community of people in the process of building a large cohousing community a few blocks from my house, and I had no idea.

According to their web page they originally intended to develop a portion of the Mueller development, but Mueller was taking too long so they found a difference piece of land further East on MLK.  They’re planning to build about 20 residential units with a good deal of shared spaces, all in what they call “Texas Vernacular (with a hint of Texas Eclectic)”.  I’m curious to see how this thing evolves, and how well the community is able to implement ‘consensus decisionmaking’ over the long term.  I also wonder how they’re structuring the legal entities involved.

Worldchanging has a review of Lawrence Powell’s book “Dead Pool” in which he discusses the predictions that the water supply for much of the Southwest are rapidly declining.

How rapidly? Powell cites recent studies that with current water demand and even very minor climate change (which is not what we should expect now) there’s a 50 percent chance that both Lake Powell and Lake Mead (the two largest reservoirs in the U.S.) will “reach dead pool” by 2021. That means so little water will be left in them that the water level falls below their dam’s lowest outlets (and so no more water flows from them). As Powell notes, “A probability of 50 percent means that there is an equal chance that the reservoirs could fall to dead pool later — or sooner.” [his emphasis] The take away is that, unless profound changes are made, the desert Southwest will run out of water in the next couple decades.

“For the Colorado River basin and the Southwest,” Powell says, “the threat from global warming lies not in the comfortably distant future — the threat is here today. West of the 100th meridian, the danger derives not from the slow rise of the sea but from the more rapid fall of the reservoirs… business as usual cannot continue.”

The changes needed are virtually unimaginable now. Powell shows that right now, farms in the region use 80 percent of the water, and cities use the rest — about half of that for landscaping (which is why there are fountains in Phoenix and lawns in Las Vegas). Even cutting back agricultural use and slashing landscaping use and combining them with the most aggressive conservation efforts imaginable would still only at best buy time for a new way of life suited to a much drier, much hotter climate to emerge.

Could the be the beginning of the re-emergence of American regionalism?  Will different geographic portions of the nation (and world for that matter) be forced to so radically change their lifestyles in response to climate change that regional ways of life and cultural practices will begin to emerge again?  There was a story on NPR yesterday about a radio ad campaign in Brazil encouraging everyone to save a toilet flush per day by urinating in the shower; I wonder what other cultural practices will be questioned as we try to grapple with a radically different relationship between culture and commodities.