Meaning in the Neighborhood

2021-07-26T19:11:00-04:00

The email from my friend Hildegarde Duane said, “Dear Friends, finally, with the help of my pandemic companion online editors and spirit guide Canelo, here is my walking meditation: Meaning in the Neighborhood.”

Succinctly written and read, her video offers stories resonating from architecture of her neighborhood. Series of connected footage flowing through as the author and her ‘step dog’ walking down the sidewalks of her few blocks of domesticity. She connects the viewer to the city in humanizing pace as the sentimentality of our build environment is told in fade in-fade out verses.

She writes and photographs in urban Los Angeles, sort of illuminating how our lives look and feel like in this kind of a city. How are the histories made and forgotten? Do we know our neighborhoods anymore? Why did the new owners cut the trees? What do those arches mean? What frames architecture? What’s in it for urbanism? These are my questions. She offers no answers.
However, her stories define the p...

Building a monastic town in Messkirch

2012-03-21T22:40:00-04:00

It will take about 40 years until the final stone is laid in the monastery church. By then it is highly unlikely that Geurten will still be alive. But he doesn't mind. "I just want a founding father's tomb in the crypt.

In the spring of 2013, 62 year contractor old Bert Geurten will begin construction of an authentic medieval monastery town near Messkirch, in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg. The goals of the project will extend to not only visual and architectural authenticity but also to build a medieval monastery the old-fashioned way. Meaning working conditions, methodology and techniques will be strictly 9th-century.

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Meaning in the Neighborhood

Building a monastic town in Messkirch