Travel sketches
I’ve uploaded some sketches I did in France and Greece about a year and a half ago, in December 2013 and January 2014. Check them out here!
Living Small Part 4: California
This is Part 4 of a series based on my lecture last week at the Tulane School of Architecture. You can catch up with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 here. Our journey continues in California, as we head through the redwoods and along Highway 1 for the final part of this trip. California could be considered the home of the modern tiny house movement, and it’s home to perhaps the best-known proponent of tiny houses: Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. Tumbleweed was founded by a man named Jay Shafer, a very charismatic advocate for tiny houses who has since moved on to start a new company called Four …
Living Small Part 3: Oregon
This is Part 3 of a series based on my lecture last week at the Tulane School of Architecture. You can catch up with Part 1 and Part 2 here. The tiny house journey continues as we leave Washington for the state of Oregon. This leg of the trip featured a lot of camping and hiking, including a side trip to Crater Lake National Park, shown above. It was late May and the park, still partially snowed in, was beautiful. It was in Oregon that I began to visit tiny houses on wheels. Their popularity has taken off in the past few years via the Internet. …
Living Small Part 2: Washington
This is Part 2 of a series based on my lecture last week at the Tulane School of Architecture. You can catch up with Part 1 here. Our journey begins in Seattle, Washington, where the first person I interviewed was Mike Podowski. Mike is the Land Use Policy Manager for the City of Seattle, a job he described to me as covering everything from helicopter safety to the number of goats that people can own. I wanted to talk to Mike about the Backyard Cottage program, which was launched as a pilot program in 2006 and expanded citywide in 2009. The City of Seattle had in fact …
Living Small in the PNW: Part 1
This past Monday I had the opportunity to lecture at the Tulane School of Architecture about the research trip I took in May. Many thanks to Professor Errol Barron for the kind introduction, and to the School of Architecture and specifically the John William Lawrence Travel Research Fellowship for making the trip possible in the first place. Not quite two years ago, around December 2012, I bought an 18’-long flatbed utility trailer and decided to build a tiny house on wheels. Working in a driveway in Virginia, I framed the floor using pressure-treated 2×6 joists salvaged from the wooden trailer deck, and insulated it using 1″ and …
Terre-de-Bas tourist center inaugurated
This news dates back to March 16, but I just recently found the picture that truly drives it home. This time last summer I was in Guadeloupe working with a group of students from VISIONS Service Adventures on a project to convert an open-air pavilion into a tourist welcome center for the small island of Terre-de-Bas. We left the project substantially built but unfinished — lacking paint and many finishing touches. Well, the local community stepped up to finish the job in style. The new tourist welcome center was inaugurated in March, in a ceremony that included the mayor of …
My (authoritative) guide to visiting New Orleans
Introduction New Orleans is justly famous for its food, music, and Mardi Gras celebrations. In some ways, it has more in common with some Caribbean communities than it does with other, more uptight, American cities. Embrace the relaxed way of life; don’t spend all your time rushing from place to place. New Orleans grew up around the curve in the Mississippi River that gave it the name “Crescent City”, and there’s no north-south-east-west grid to help you get around. Instead, directions can be given as “lakeside” (generally, north), “riverside” (generally, south), “upriver” or “uptown” (generally, west), and “downriver” or “downtown” …