Dimaxion house

The Henry Ford

We went to the Henry Ford (that is the name for Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village now) last Saturday, as some of our family was in our old rust bucket industrial town for Thanksgiving. We took the kids, were not the only three generation group in the place.

My Dad used to teach in Dearborn, work at the museum summers. I have been witness to the evolution of the place. It now fancies itself as a museum of industry. I used to love to watch the craftspeople: glass blowers, potters, blacksmiths, weavers and textile makers, handcrafts of all sorts.

The hand crafts have been in decline. They have a grove of mulberry trees for the silk worms, but it doesn’t look used any more, they buy the silk worms. Textile demonstrators are not skilled crafts people, but docents who know little of the craft they are supposed to demonstrate.

They do not pay or give respect to glass blowers and blacksmiths. The craftspeople have gone elsewhere. The Henry Ford doesn’t mess with hand crafts anymore.

Their focus is now on the industrial revolution. Luddites must seek other education venues. The huge black coal burning train engines are still there. All sorts of buggies and early cars facinate the visitor. They have a GTO. (I loved this, began humming Beach Boys) There are presidential Lincolns and toy trains. There are interactive exhibits for making car chassis and airplanes so kids can spend time seeing what works.

Dimaxion House

One exhibit I have wanted to go to since they refurbished it was the Dimaxion house exhibit. They had a docent tour of it. R. Bucky Fuller designed the thing in 1929. He made two prototypes in 1949, made progress toward mass production during that time of extreme housing shortage.

The house itself was space efficent and energy efficent. There were storage inventions, closets and revolving shelves.

I did not know how water efficent the round house was before we went, was impressed. Rain water fell into a cistern below the house. The bathroom was one surface, small and cleanable. Bucky’s vision was such that it would very little time to clean the place.

Buckminister Fuller’s thinking came a long way to making a sustainable building, designed it in large part to be built in an airplane factory. I came away thinking how sad it was that the visionary and the bankers and the doers could not come together on this project. Many of the ideas were incorperated into later housing designs, not the most efficient ones. If we had been able to accomplish suburban exansion with anything approaching the low foot print of the Dimaxion House, we would be in better shape today.

I have a tender place in my heart for the visionary. The banker and industrialist are important too. We are at a flash point in history. I hope we can learn from this, would like to know more of the stories of ego clashing so we don’t repeat the failure of seeing and implementing useful technology. It’s gonna take a village to propel us into the 21st century. There is not a lot of space left, we are all in it together. When we leave the negotiation table, stop the negotiations, there is not where to go. Sticking your head in the sand will not be an option.

Gotta Have More Oil

Gotta Have More Oil Or We Will All Be Riding Bicycles

I was listening to public radio. The anchor interviewed a miner, union man from northern Minnesota was asked who he supported for president. He said his Daddy was a miner and union man too who would have voted democratic, but the young miner himself was voting for Mcain. He trotted out the old we gotta have more oil chestnut. “We gotta have more oil or we’ll all be riding bicycles.”

When I was a kid in the 50’s I recall my uncle repeating that. We gotta have more oil, over and over.

I believe what leadership is, is seeing the way ahead. I believe Obama is the leader who has the courage to try. Folks will follow when they see a protocol, know what will work.

Many concrete thinkers say we gotta have more oil, other wise it won’t be like it has always been. We don’t have more oil. I am not interested in the dregs. They are dirty and expensive. Peak oil and global warming, the end of the economy as we know it is upon us. Has been for a half a century.

Mistake it is, to spend our time and capitol drilling for more oil. Doing so makes the world dirty, unsustainable. If we have more oil people keep driving gas guzzlers. We can run the tapes over and over keep living the same day over and over until we get it right, like in the movie Ground Hog Day, we can do this for a few years more, but some time we gotta awake to a new day.

What are the young folks thinking for their future, and now that we have used up most of the oil, how can we help them for their future? Conservation for now. Us urban folks could drive bicycles if it was safer and if we could stop for a shower at the health club near work. The folks in the sticks are going to have to have vehicles. My 2008 Ford Focus has a cool readout that will tell me my average MPG. My son’s 94 Caddy has the same thing. Apparently luxury car drivers have had this devise for a while. I enjoy using the gadget, driving slower and with slower starts and stops, reminds me of my youth in the 70’s during the oil crisis when we’d milk every tankful of gas for as much as we could. (We had a 55 mile and hour speed limit nationwide, we’d start slow, coast down hills.)

We will need to try new innovation asap. Fortunes will be made and lost. This innovation could have been done privately before the mortgage and credit crunches. Corporate welfare and obscene profits do not seem to have been spent on innovation. It will have to be the government who will have to invest in innovation now.

There is a guy in California who drives an electric car. He has a solar panel on his roof to charge that car. He had to develop this technology, convert the car himself because he couldn’t buy one. I tried to find an electric car before we bought the Ford Focus. There is an electric car being made, but it is made for the carriage trade. (Costs, 60-90,000. Henry Ford made us all think affordable cars were a birthright when the Ford Company made a model T. Then the government built roads. Sorry, we are going to need an electric car that costs under 20,000 to keep those roads up.)

Solar panels on all of our parking lots, provide shade, lower temperature make electricity and catch runoff. (I am a hydrology watcher, live by an urban river and hope to use technology to return the hydrology of rivers and watersheds to healthy.) A solar panel on every roof (Including the White house), wind generation stations on every breezy corner (with technology to stop the turbines so as not to hurt birds or kids), grass to garden technology, healthy ecosystems.

There are lots of Yada Yadas. Every wild eyed visionary has a plan. Lets get to it before the baby boomers get too old to help.

BTW experience in governing the nation might be useful, but youth and stamina will be more important, this ball game is gonna mix it up, because we all need to do this together. We are all gonna have to let some of our favorite beliefs go, work together. I hope we have learned how to be good to each other. Gentleman, ladies, folks, start your engines.

Fans of learning by doing, this is time to shine. Institutionalizing it all will have it’s place, but the institutions cannot keep up, get intrenched. The question of our time will be for the institutionalizers to shake hands with the innovators. Good thing we all have computers and the internet to keep in touch.